Wood

Thanks to Forest Business Network for this one..

Australia’s first public building made from cross-laminated timber (CLT) has opened its doors. The Library at the Dock in Melbourne was built in partnership between the City of Melbourne, Places Victoria and Lend Lease. The major structural components of the three-storey library are made from more than 500m³ of CLT, produced at Stora Enso’s Ybbs and Bad St Leonhard units in Austria.

One of the main advantages of building with wood is the construction time: the building structure was completed in two-and-a-half months.

“The Australian construction industry is well used to working with wood, and CLT has recently been gaining a lot of attention from construction companies due to its many advantages. The Library at the Dock is an excellent example of how wood, and especially CLT, can deliver added value as a construction material,” said Matti Mikkola, vice-president, Building Solutions, Stora Enso Building and Living.

The Library at the Dock stands on a wharf originally designed in 1879. CLT’s light weight meant only a limited number of additional pilings and repairs of the old timber posts were required.

In addition to CLT’s speed and weight advantages, it also has strong environmental credentials.

“CLT offers a sustainable alternative to conventional materials, given its potential to be carbon negative,” said Andrew Nieland, head of timber solutions for Lend Lease. “CLT is a lightweight, strong, solid wood and, given its prefabricated nature, drives efficiency improvements onsite.”

The Library at the Dock achieved a 6 Star Green Star rating from the Green Building Council of Australia.

Melbourne is already home to the world’s tallest CLT residential building. The 10-storey Forté Tower, also in the Docklands area, opened last year.

So does anyone out there know why Austria had to provide the CLT? There are no producers anywhere in Australia? Why is that- patents? Investment requirements?

The weather these last couple of days has made me tornado-sensitive, and I ran across this story from the Insurance Journal (through a link from Forest Business Network). Here’s the link and below are some excerpts. Note Robert Bonnie’s statement at the end.

Bob Falk is frugal and a realist.

The research engineer at Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis. could have used expensive lumber, pricey nails and high-grade plywood in his tests to create an almost impenetrable tornado shelter made of wood. But that would have missed the point.

That’s why Falk and his team of engineers have been using an air cannon to fire, at 100 mph, 12-foot long, 15-pound southern pine 2-by-4s into specially designed walls made of some of the cheapest wood available.

The cannon mimics the forces of an F5 tornado with 250-mph winds. The lumber used to make the walls of the shelter is of such low quality, Falk had to specially order it because he couldn’t find it at area lumber yards or hardware stores.

“This is quite a resilient design,” Falk said after a test shot. “All we’re trying to do is absorb the energy.”

stormThe goal is to create an economical wood-based shelter that can be easily constructed in a basement or garage by anyone halfway skilled with a hammer and saw. The process for making a tornado safe room could be similar to that of building a storage shed that comes in a kit.

“You buy the lumber, you take it home, you put it together,” Falk told the Wisconsin State Journal. “And that’s an important aspect. Most safe rooms you can only put into new (homes).”

And the cost can be prohibitive for many. A basic safe room can easily cost between $6,000 and $15,000. Some are designed to be installed under the concrete slab of a garage while others are buried in a backyard. Exterior safe rooms, whether above or below ground, also pose a threat because users must go outside to access the shelter, Falk said.

The Forest Products Laboratory design costs between $3,000 and $4,000, can be bolted to the concrete floor of a basement or garage and consists of interlocking layers of low-grade board covered on the interior and exterior with plywood. The shelter has a steel door, which contributes about $1,500 to the cost, but Falk is working on plans for a wood door to further reduce the cost.

“The (low price) is another incentive for people to put one in their home,” Falk said. “It’s about the cost of a hot tub.”

Spring and summer in the Midwest and the South means tornado season. Last year, more than 30 people were killed in Oklahoma from a series of tornadoes. This year, 35 people have died, primarily in the South, from 74 confirmed tornadoes, including 15 in Arkansas.

Wisconsin is yet to experience a tornado this year, but in 2013 there were 16 documented tornadoes, resulting in no deaths and two injuries, according to the National Weather Service. The 30-year normal for the state is 23 tornadoes a year. Since 1844, the weather service reports that 511 people have been killed in Wisconsin tornadoes.

The state’s worst was in 1899 when 117 people died and 125 were injured in St. Croix County. But more people remember the F5 tornado that killed 9 people, injured 200 and caused $40 million in damage to the Iowa County village of Barneveld on June 8, 1984. The Stoughton tornado, in 2005, killed one person, sent three to the hospital and caused more than $45 million in damage to the city and surrounding towns.

Almost 15 months after the devastating storm, the town of Dunn in 2009 opened a $650,000 shelter with poured concrete tilt-up walls in the Bayview Heights neighborhood, home to 227 mobile homes. The above-ground shelter can hold 500 people and is also used as an emergency warming and cooling shelter and during severe thunderstorm warnings with high wind.

During the 2005 tornado, some residents drove into the storm in an attempt to reach the Stoughton Fire Department for shelter while others took refuge in nearby culverts.

“It’s taken 227 homes that were missing that one basic, very necessary safety feature and made them more safe,” said Cathy Hasslinger, the town’s clerk and treasurer. “The rural location there really made a shelter important.”

Falk’s design and research, which includes filming the tests with a high-speed camera, could have a similar impact. Demand is overwhelming the capacity of storm shelter builders in Oklahoma, The Associated Press reported. An affordable do-it-yourself model can only be a positive, said Robert Bonnie, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s undersecretary for natural resources and environment.

Bonnie was in Madison recently to tour the laboratory and watch Falk fire his cannon. Bonnie grew up on a farm outside of Louisville, Kentucky, and remembers cowering in the basement during one particularly bad storm in 1973 when he was 6 years old.

“For a long time I was actually pretty nervous about storms because of that,” Bonnie said. “This (FPL research) is critically important, not only for the direct use of providing safe shelters for people in tornadoes, but also, we need a vibrant wood products industry.”

This should be the link to some videos of the technology in Dropbox (if you like splinters, you’ll love this video) If you try it and it doesn’t work, let me know!

Also here’s some more information.

Thought folks might be interested in this piece from Popular Science here.

Why the sudden interest in wood? Compared with steel or concrete, CLT, also known as mass timber, is cheaper, easier to assemble, and more fire resistant, thanks to the way wood chars. It’s also more sustainable. Wood is renewable like any crop, and it’s a carbon sink, sequestering the carbon dioxide it absorbed during growth even after it’s been turned into lumber. Waugh Thistleton estimates that the wood in Stadthaus stores 186 tons of carbon while the steel and concrete for a similar, conventionally built tower would have generated 137 tons of carbon dioxide during production. Wood nets a savings of 323 tons.

Demographers predict that the planet’s urban citizenry will double in 36 years, increasing the demand for ever-taller structures in ever-denser cities. Whether architects and construction firms build those towers from unsustainable materials like steel and concrete or employ new materials like CLT could make a huge difference in the Earth’s health. Put differently, the world’s urban future may just lie in its oldest building material.

…..

But the biggest driving force behind the turn toward wood is a growing awareness among architects and developers about their field’s contribution to climate change. “Our industry leads all others in terms of its impact on the planet and human health,” Waugh says. Concrete and steel require enormous amounts of energy to produce and transport, generating more than a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of steel or concrete.

Wood, on the other hand—even engineered wood like CLT, which requires additional energy to cut and press into sections—is far more environmentally friendly. According to Wood for Good, an organization that advocates for sustainable wood construction, a ton of bricks requires four times the amount of energy to produce as a ton of sawn softwood; concrete requires five times, steel 24 times, and aluminum 126 times. Wood also performs better: It is, for example, five times more insulative than concrete and 350 times more so than steel. That means less energy is needed to heat and cool a wood building.

When CLT is used to build high-rise towers, the carbon savings can be enormous. The 186 tons of carbon locked into Stadthaus are enough to offset 20 years of its daily operations, meaning that for the first two decades of its life, the building isn’t carbon neutral—it is actually carbon negative. Rather than producing greenhouse gases, Stadthaus is fighting them.

From Senator Pryor’s site here.

WASHINGTON D.C. – U.S. Senators Mark Pryor (D-AR), Roy Blunt (R-MO), John Boozman (R-AR), Angus King (I-ME), Susan Collins (R-ME), Mike Crapo (R-ID), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) today introduced the Forest Products Fairness Act, a bipartisan bill that provides new opportunities for American forestry producers by allowing their products to qualify for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s BioPreferred Program.

The USDA BioPreferred Program was created to provide new markets for farm commodities and encourage consumers to purchase environmentally-friendly biobased products. Despite the sustainability of wood, pulp and paper products, the USDA has not designated these products as a USDA Certified Biobased Products. The Forest Products Fairness Act would allow domestic forestry products to be labeled as biobased so they could receive increased consumer attention as well as federal government procurement preference. This designation would also level the playing field between domestically-produced wood products and imported products such as Chinese bamboo, which is already eligible for the biobased label and used as a “green” alternative for hardwood flooring or lumber.

“From farms to mills to manufacturers, it’s evident that the forestry industry is vital to Arkansas’s economy,” Pryor said. “By allowing these home-grown companies to expand and compete on same playing field as their international counterparts, our bipartisan bill will build on their success and keep this industry growing.”

“Forestry is an important economic driver in rural Missouri and nationwide,” Blunt said. “I’m glad to support this bipartisan bill, which will help increase economic opportunities for job creators and help our forestry producers compete in a competitive global economy.”

“Many Arkansas jobs depend on our renewable forest resources and the forest products industry and we need to end the discrimination in federal policy against these American jobs,” Boozman said. “This commonsense bill will provide domestically produced forest products with the same label and treatment as imported biobased products.”

“Maine is one of the most forested states in the nation and our forest-based industry plays an instrumental role in the vitality of our state’s economy,” said King. “By finally labeling forest products as what they truly are – biobased products – this bipartisan, common-sense measure will level the playing field for Maine’s foresters and help them to continue thriving in the global economy.”

“From timber to paper and pulp, Maine’s vast forest land is a tremendous source of value for our state’s economy and way of life,” Collins said. “I strongly support this bill because it would help dramatically expand the market for our domestic forest products by rightfully creating a level playing field with other biobased and foreign products.”

“In today’s economic climate, it is vital that we ensure Idaho’s industries are not at a competitive disadvantage due to a misinterpretation of terms,” Crapo said. “Legislation like the Forest Products Fairness Act makes it easier for the forest industry to compete in the global market place and bring economic growth and jobs to Idaho.”

“This bill takes an important step toward creating a level playing field for American businesses trying to compete with their overseas competitors,” Hatch said. “It’s a cost-free way to increase the use and awareness of domestic forestry products in a way that’s good for the economy.”

The BioPreferred Program was originally created by the 2002 Farm Bill to increase the purchase and use of biobased products. Under the program, every federal agency is required to rank their preference of biobased products for purchasing decisions. To increase consumer recognition of biobased products, the program also created voluntary labeling. Since the program’s inception, the USDA has designated more 33 items, representing nearly 3,000 products, as biobased products.