Mass Timber A Sustainable Approach to Modern Construction

Pete Kobelt, Director, Mass Timber Solutions, STO Building Group

The Role of Mass Timber in Sustainable Construction

I imported the first commercial and residential mass timber projects to the U.S. in 2010 and have since helped start four mass timber factories, delivered numerous major projects and I am currently leading STO Building Group’s North American Mass Timber Business Unit in support of all fourteen companies in STO’s family of builders.

The production of concrete and steel requires massive amounts of energy, hence the name “High Embodied Energy” materials, which release significant volumes of carbon into the atmosphere.  Combined just those two building materials account for – 15 percent of global carbon emissions.  Trees, conversely, act as carbon consumers, removing it from the atmosphere and also sequestering it in its wood fiber.  Mindful and sustainable management of our working forests provides renewable, carbon neutral or negative building materials, protects the forests from development while delivering healthy, high performance buildings that can be designed to use less energy, faster and with significantly less waste than conventional buildings.

In addition, wood residuals like sawdust, chips and bark from primary and secondary processing are always utilized in secondary value added products like wood pellets and on MDF products while the very lowest value residuals can be burned to create low carbon energy.

Challenges facing the timber industry include a dramatic shift from procuring timber from federally managed National Forests to State & private timberland owners.  Today there are  50mm acres of dead standing Mountain Pine Beetle kill in the Rocky Mountain west, including Canada.  Lack of forest management driven largely by a lack of understanding of what that term really means has left millions vast swaths of timber congested, infested and at great risk for widespread catastrophic fires – these fires are “carbon bombs” releasing decades of stored carbon back into the atmosphere in potently concentrated form.

Various sustainable timber sourcing certifications like FSC, SFI & PEFC are helping educate the market on best practices in forestry and helping owners craft and narrate the critical role forestry plays in the mass timber story. 

As the notion of a circular economy becomes mainstream, we are constantly studying how to design, engineer, manufacture and build mass timber structures that are not only designed for manufacturing and assembly but designed for deconstruction and repurposing as well.  Not an easy task but as demand from smaller, underserved markets wanting to utilize mass timber components emerges, the opportunity to refabricate the timber elements into smaller members to be utilized in more residential or ADU type applications becomes possible.

"Mindful and sustainable management of our working forests provides renewable, carbon-neutral or negative building materials, protects the forests from development while delivering healthy, high-performance buildings."

Market Adoption, Global Trends & Innovations in Mass Timber

With origins in Austria, Switzerland & Germany - 30 years ago, mass timber emerged as a means of adding further value to timber by utilizing more of the log, removing defects and with advances in powerful adhesives, creating high value, prefabricated engineered wood building components.  At the same time, concerns about carbon and high embodied energy building materials were emerging and the added value of a low or negative carbon material began to earn broad appeal.  Fast forward to today where the construction industry faces increasingly acute labor shortages as younger generations don’t recognize career paths in the trades, offsite prefabrication and subsequent reduced onsite labor requirements have become increasingly attractive to the market.

Mass Timber also offers distinct product differentiation for developers across all sectors and particularly higher education markets have dramatically embraced mass timber for campus projects.  As companies grapple with strategies to lure workers back to offices, the beauty and biophilia, our innate affinity for natural materials, offer broad appeal to employers and employees.  In addition, most schools, K-12 and higher education alike, have urgent climate scorecards and sustainability initiatives along with health & wellness mandates for staff and students and Mass Timber helps check many important boxes for these stakeholders.

As we monitor our European colleagues, we see advances toward additional levels of prefabrication and modular products.  The question arose that if we are already embracing offsite prefabrication of CLT and Glulam, why stop there?  In one interview with Binderholz, we discovered that at certain times of the year, a solid half of the CLT production was being sold directly into the Holzbau (literally - wood construction) shops for use in prefabrication, flatpack and volumetric modular housing products.  For context, half of Binder’s production is equivalent to all of North America’s Mass Timber combined.

In addition, as interest in Mass Timber grows, we see an emerging and underserved market in smaller, residential, ADU and modular offerings.

Educating Future Professionals & Creating a Lasting Industry Impact

With the proliferation of Mass Timber in the education sector, university stakeholders, particularly those with architecture, engineering, construction science and forestry programs as a few examples began to ask about curriculum development which was very well received by the industry.  Today there are multiple schools with Mass Timber buildings on their campuses (Princeton has six, four at University of Arkansas, a second being built at Clemson today) that are developing and in the case of University of Arkansas, Fay Jones School of Architecture & Design, already offering a one year, three semester Masters in Integrated Wood Design which includes a number of courses specifically on Mass Timber.

As such we are encouraging the AEC communities to invest in educating themselves on Mass Timber, design, engineering, fabrication and construction while doing the same with our interns, sending them back to campus asking about Mass Timber courses.