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Summary
• FPRI is researching the best form of panel to manufacture from home-grown timber.
• The research is also examining the potential market for the product.
• If it is viable it is up to manufacturers to invest in establishing production.
• The route to market may require a consortium, rather than a single company.

With more than 200 separate definitions on the internet, “sustainability” must surely be the perfect word for politicians: it can, after all, mean whatever they – or you – want it to mean.

Take, for example, the inherent question of embodied energy – ie. the amount of fuel and all other energy consumed in taking a tree from a forest in central Europe, turning it into a timber product and then transporting the product to the UK and then to its ultimate destination on a building site in.

Your obvious response to this might well be that this must be far less sustainable than manufacturing the same product here, but is this actually true? A product that comes from a central European source, such as southern Austria, may be 200 miles further from London than Inverness. But, while transport from the former may consume more diesel, the likelihood is that the energy costs involved in delivery from forest to sawmill, processing and subsequent manufacture are less with our Austrian, German and Swiss cousins.

Integrated production

In part this can be attributed to local efficiencies when compared to our historical supply chain challenges, but it can also be down to the fact that the manufacturing plants for products such as cross-laminated timber (CLT), also abbreviated to cross-lam or X-Lam, are cheek-by-jowl with the sawmill where the raw material is processed.

All of which makes the many enquiries received at Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute (FPRI) about the availability or otherwise of CLT manufactured from home-grown material less than straightforward to answer. The immediate response is that it’s not made in this country, but the underlying question – why not? – is not so easy to parry with architects and other specifiers who are under considerable pressure to show that their design and construction intentions meet the highest environmental and sustainability standards. Generalised responses about fuel and energy usage cut no ice, especially with those who are aware of the extent of the UK’s softwood forest resource and the low value end products where much of it currently ends up. Transport is not the issue here: manufacture is.

UK research

Research has begun to examine whether the making of this particular product is commercially viable in the UK using home-grown timber. At a time when the construction industry here has yet to fully recover from the economic downturn, it is entirely conceivable that a UK form of CLT could be available as and when it does.

The work being undertaken at FPRI (with financial support from the Scottish government, Scottish Enterprise and Forestry Commission Scotland) aims to build on the Institute’s previous research into the properties of Sitka spruce and other commercially-grown species (Scots pine, larch, Douglas fir) and will identify the optimum form of panel that can be manufactured from these timbers. The University has now purchased and installed the necessary press and gluing machinery and timber is being acoustically and visually graded with a view to having the first panels available this month.

All of the engineering and manufacturing issues involved will be fully tested to ascertain that this new home-grown timber product will be fully compliant with existing and pending regulations. The 18-month programme will also examine the potential market (and specialist niches within it) and the extent of the forest resource necessary to ensure the economic viability – and competitiveness – of a product manufactured here.

Commercial viability

The R&D work is being supported by Forestry Commission Scotland and Scottish Enterprise to reduce the various obstacles to market, and the research outputs will therefore be generic in nature. Presuming commercial viability can be fully demonstrated, it will then be down to the timber processing and manufacturing sectors to invest the capital necessary to establish UK production of CLT.

This may seem a big ask in a country that has no sizeable manufacturing of other long-established and in-demand engineered timber products such as glulam, but it would be folly if the particular opportunity of CLT was to be similarly missed; not only is this a high added-value product that will be in huge and long-term demand when construction returns to full activity, but it also has the potential to deliver financial return all along the supply chain.

The optimum route to market may well require a consortium-driven rather than a single company-led approach, but this is to get ahead of ourselves; first we need to show it can be successfully manufactured here from our own renewable forest resources. Which, I needn’t really add, is the ideal sustainable solution.

Peter Wilson is director of the Wood Studio, one of four specialist centres within Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute.