On Tuesday September 4 Edinburgh Napier University will host a one-day conference on cross-laminated timber (CLT). Nothing especially unusual in this you might think – perhaps just another in a series of Continuing Professional Development events the University has promoted on this subject to construction professionals on behalf of the Wood for Good marketing campaign.
This conference is different, however, in that it marks the culmination of an 18-month research and development programme the University’s twin institutes of Sustainable Construction and Forest Products Research have been engaged in with a view to bringing this much-in-demand product into manufacture in the UK from home-grown timber. The day is aimed at key players in the forestry, timber and construction industries and will table all of the research information and test results from the project with a view to stimulating investment decisions about the plant and manufacturing facilities needed to get CLT into production in the UK.
But this is to get ahead of the story. Since cross-laminated timber started to make an impression on the UK construction industry, there have been architects and other specifiers asking why the product couldn’t be manufactured from UK-grown timber. Things changed in August 2010 when Scotland’s first Housing Expo opened to the public at Milton of Leys near Inverness, a project designed to encourage innovation in housing and which comprised 55 separate designs for new houses suited to the prevailing climatic, construction and economic conditions in Scotland.
The project attracted 30,000 visitors, including several senior Scottish government ministers who found the results extremely compelling but also troubling. The latter response came from their realisation that many of the components and products delivering innovation were manufactured overseas. Emanating from this was an instruction to Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute via Scottish Enterprise and Forestry Commission Scotland to explore what was required to get CLT into manufacture in Scotland from Scottish-grown timber.
In many ways this might be seen as a long overdue political initiative from whatever administration happened to be in charge. Forestry is a major part of Scotland’s rural economy – indeed, of the country’s economy overall – and any initiatives that might encourage increased levels of sustainable local employment are constantly sought.
Scotland contains the bulk of the UK’s production forestry, with four main species – Sitka spruce, Scots pine, larch and Douglas fir – dominating industrial production. Of these, Sitka is the main resource and the Strategic Integrated Research in Timber (SIRT) project led by Edinburgh Napier University and partnered by the University of Glasgow and Forest Research has worked for the best part of 10 years to characterise the properties of this species with a view to providing solidly-founded information on which new products and other possibilities might be developed to raise the value of this resource.
Priority objective
The results of this work have been published by Forestry Commission Scotland and the task of delivering new products, process improvements and construction systems from the country’s Sitka spruce resource has been taken on by the Wood Products Innovation Gateway, a three-year, £1.48m programme supported by the European Regional Development Fund, Forestry Commission Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, Confor and Wood for Good. The project is led by the Wood Studio, one of five research centres within Edinburgh Napier University’s Forest Products Research Institute. Within the growing, industry-led programme of new ideas and concepts the institute has under development, the challenge to bring CLT manufactured from home-grown timber to market as soon as possible is the largest and the priority objective.
To put things in context, when the project began there was no UK facility with the equipment to manufacture CLT panels for testing. Rather than send material abroad for manufacture and return, FPRI’s sister Institute of Sustainable Construction bought a small press and, once installed and with imber graded (initially from six species – Sitka spruce, Scots pine, larch, Douglas fir, hemlock and Lawson cypress), began panel manufacture last summer. These panels have since been extensively tested to meet Eurocode 5 and the results, which are currently being collated, have been extremely encouraging. Separate parts of the project have explored the market potential for domestically produced CLT as well as other issues important from an investment perspective.
The conference on September 4 aims to bring objective, detailed information to the fore. The UK may be some way behind central Europe in the production of CLT, but two years on from a green light to carry out the necessary R&D, we are now in a far better position to look seriously at commercial, domestic manufacture of home-grown CLT – and perhaps to anticipate it actually happening and being ready for when the long anticipated upswing in construction begins.
