Timber building is pitched strongly on its carbon benefits. It generates fewer emissions in the production of its building components compared with building with steel and concrete and also in the transport of those components to site due to wood’s strength to weight advantages. On top of that, timber buildings store the carbon the timber sequestered while growing for the lifetime of the building and then beyond, as it can easily be recycled and reused. Plus, timber is an inherent insulant, giving timber buildings the edge when it comes to energy performance.
All this was covered at Timber Development UK’s Timber Design Conference in July. Now an annual event and backed by Swedish Wood (the plans of which for UK market development you can read about on pp47-50), it attracted around 200 people. The audience included timber suppliers, timber builders, architects, plus other specifiers such as housing association and local government representatives.
But beyond carbon, speakers broadened the message about timber-based building to include its wider environmental and social benefits.
Melissa Mean of community land trust WeCanMake (wecanmake.org) focused on how timber building lends itself to community inclusivity, with its housing prefabricated in ‘flying factories’ involving local people – a form of community self-build. It enables communities to design, make and adapt their neighbourhood on their own terms, said Ms Mean.
WeCanMake has also teamed with timber pioneer architects Waugh Thistleton in the development of MultiMax, effectively a timber building kit also designed for localised prefabrication and construction.
The government has clearly bought into the broad benefits of timber building, hence its formation with the industry of the Timber in Construction Working Group, which in turn has produced the Timber in Construction Roadmap with its strategies for developing the timber construction sector. A key element of this is also about driving the home-grown timber industry and at the conference Matt Stephenson of Ecosystems-Technologies described its work to the same end through broadening the capabilities of UK engineered wood. It now makes volumetric buildings in UK wood-based glulam, CLT and nail-laminated components.
Well-known in the timber trade for his advocacy of building in wood, architect Craig White explored how the ‘social value impact’ can make timber construction even more cost competitive. His current business Agile Homes is also an advocate of the ‘decentralised manufacturing’ approach with the use of ‘flying factories’ in conjunction with a central production hub. This combines with timber’s environmental impact to give its homes high social value and, explained Mr White, local authorities can release their land for high social value housing developments at below market rate. It is, he said, affordable land “hiding in plain sight”.
Agile Homes is also capitalising on the broader carbon value of timber building. It is offering its housing as a carbon offsetting investment alternative to forests and tree planting to businesses looking to enhance their carbon profile and ESG (environmental, social and governance) credentials. In fact, it has already completed its first transaction in ‘carbon and social value tokens’, with its homes effectively acting as the carbon and social value collateral.
