by Web Editor | Mar 23, 2018 | News
Washington State legislators changed building codes in new legislation, a move expected to increase in the use of mass timber products in commercial and residential construction.
The Washington Forest Protection Association says the move will boost business for rural communities and forest landowners and will lead to an increase in the use of mass timber products in commercial and residential construction.
Mass timber products like cross-laminated timber (CLT) have been on the upswing in Washington in recent years, with Vaagen Brothers Lumber of Colville. Wash., and Katerra, a California company both announcing CLT factories in Eastern Washington. The material is increasingly being used in buildings around the state, according to the Washington Forest Products Association.
For Katerra, founded in 2015, CLT is an element in a broader strategy for resetting the building and construction industry. The company announced $865 million Series D funding round led by the SoftBank Vision Fund to fund its new plant in Washington, and it has already accumulated more than $1.3 billion in bookings for new construction, spanning the multi-family, student and senior housing, and hospitality sectors. It already has a fully operational manufacturing facility in Phoenix.
“The $12 trillion construction industry is extremely fragmented with tens of thousands of companies using minimal levels of technology. While labor-productivity growth has skyrocketed in the overall global economy, the construction industry has averaged only 1% annual productivity growth over the past two decades,” said Jeffrey Housenbold, managing partner for SoftBank Investment Advisers. New investors in Katerra’s latest the round include the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), a private investment fund managed by Soros Fund Management LLC, Tavistock Group, Navitas Capital, DivcoWest, and others.
Read more on this from Woodworking Network at https://www.woodworkingnetwork.com/news/woodworking-industry-news/washington-state-wil-revise-building-codes-okay-mass-timber.
by Web Editor | May 20, 2016 | News
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell today announced over $8.5 million to expand and accelerate technologies and strategies that promote the use of wood in commercial construction, heat and power generation, and other wood product innovations that also benefit forest health. Federal funds will leverage more than $18 million in investments from 42 business, university, nonprofit and Tribal partners in 19 states, for a total investment of $27 million.
“We are looking for opportunities to reduce forest restoration costs and create more jobs through strong forest products markets,” said Chief Tidwell. “This funding supports improving forest health on the National Forest System lands and other forested lands and promotes the economic and environmental well being of rural communities.”
The awarded funds will stimulate the use of hazardous fuels from National Forest System lands and other forested lands to promote forest health while simultaneously generating rural jobs. This year, 77 proposals were received for the Forest Service’s Wood Innovations grant program, highlighting the expanding interest and use of wood as a renewable energy source and as an innovative building material.
Healthy markets for forest products help the nation’s forests mitigate some of the impacts of climate change. Research has demonstrated that wood products from responsibly managed forests outperform other building materials in measures of greenhouse gas intensity, air and water pollution and other environmental impacts. Responsibly-sourced forest products also provide income for private landowners that keep their land forested and supports needed investments in forest management to provide clean water, wildlife habitat, and other resources millions of Americans depend upon.
Today’s announcement supports USDA’s Building Blocks for Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry-a comprehensive effort to provide America’s farmers, ranchers and forest landowners with the tools and resources they need to combat climate change. Through this work, USDA expects to reduce net emissions and enhance carbon sequestration in soils and forests by over 120 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year by 2025-the equivalent of taking 25 million cars off the road or offsetting the emissions produced by powering nearly 11 million homes each year.
From the USDA: https://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?contentid=2016/05/0115.xml&contentidonly=true
by Web Editor | Mar 18, 2016 | News
The Engineered Wood Construction Guide, APA’s comprehensive and widely recognized guide to engineered wood construction systems, has been updated and is now available on the APA website.
The 92-page guide features information on engineered wood products and recommendations for their use in a wide range of applications in residential and commercial construction. It includes information on plywood and oriented strand board (wood structural panels), glulam, I-joists, structural composite lumber, typical specifications, and design recommendations for floor, wall, and roof systems, diaphragms, shear walls, fire-rated systems, and methods of finishing.
The guide can be downloaded free of charge in PDF format or purchased in printed format for $12 at www.apawood.org/resource-library. The online offering has been enhanced with this edition to simplify the options for downloading selected chapters of the guide or the complete publication.
First published in 1962, this is the 33rd printing of the popular guide.
by Web Editor | Feb 10, 2016 | News
Last month we saw cross-laminated timbers installed at the Albina Yard project in Portland. It was the first use of U.S.-produced CLT in a building-wide structural system.
The first level of CLT (4,000 square feet) on Albina Yard went up in fewer than four hours. Last week, the second level was installed by a crew of seven in under two hours. Pretty remarkable, considering the contractor says it would have taken at least twice as many people two days or more to frame the same amount of floor space using traditional methods. Albina Yard is a four-story, 16,000-square-foot creative office project in north Portland. Besides its snazzy design by LEVER Architecture, the project is most notable for being tangible evidence that the U.S. CLT industry is officially off the ground.
There’s been a lot of buzz around CLT and mass timber in general over the past several months in Oregon and around the country — and rightly so. Besides drastically improved speed of construction (and the savings that go with that), mass timber offers significant environmental benefits. This includes tremendous carbon-storing capacity. Half the dry weight of wood is carbon. It got there when the trees were growing and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That carbon remains locked up for as long as the wood remains in use (a nine-story wood structure in China is now 959 years old—nearly a millennium). The new trees planted to replace those that were harvested start the carbon cycle all over again.
According to a quick, back-of-the-napkin calculation, Albina Yard, which is small by commercial construction standards, stores about 80.5 metric tons of carbon. That’s equivalent to offsetting 295 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
A larger Portland mass timber building, Clay Creative (60,000 square feet), stores more than 1 million pounds of carbon. Its total of 457.5 metric tons offsets 1,678 metric tons of CO2 emissions. “An additional 3,574 metric tons of CO2 emissions were avoided by using wood rather than concrete and steel,” says Dr. Jim Bowyer, an expert on the subject at Dovetail Partners, Inc.
From the Oregon Forest Resources Institute: https://oregonforests.org/blog/mass-timber-rising
