Dr Ed Suttie is quite at home on days when the mercury dips below minus. In fact, it brings back happy memories for the director (research) at the Building Research Establishment (BRE), whose career began not in the timber or the wider construction sector but in glaciology.
As his trek to the North Pole last April indicates, Ed still has some Polar ice running through his veins but his love of exploration and his enquiring mind stems from the natural world on his own doorstep as he was growing up – and also from somewhat warmer environments.
Ed was born and raised in the small village of Harbury in rural Warwickshire, but his two older brothers were born in Malaya where his parents had met and married when they both worked there.
“My father was a tropical agricultural engineer and my mother was a teacher,” said Ed. “Throughout my childhood my dad was always popping off to exotic countries to work – anywhere from the West Indies to Thailand and China. All the different cultures were brought to life when he came back from trips and brought little mementoes for us and I became fascinated with the world and its diversity.”
Ed attended the village primary school and then “an incredibly radical secondary school” which eschewed school uniform and teachers were addressed by their first names. It had a good academic track record, however, and Ed excelled at chemistry, leading to him studying the subject at York University.
“I found the whole idea of experimenting, testing and finding new things out very intriguing. My degree had a branch subject in resource efficiency and environmental science, so I was able to connect my interest in science to my interest in the natural world and how it functioned.”
Ed graduated in 1988 at a time when science graduates were actively courted by businesses. A trip to the university’s careers office – a series of pigeon holes in which companies seeking to recruit graduates would place application forms – turned up a vacancy with the Beecham pharmaceuticals group but a far more seductive job opportunity in the adjacent pigeon hole caught Ed’s eye.
“There was a piece of paper for a glacier chemist with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS). I had no idea at the time what a glacier chemist was but it had the word ‘chemist’ and it was connecting that to the word ‘Antarctic’ so it was a very tempting combination.
“These opportunities pop up in a cycle once every five years and it’s actually hard to describe how rare they are. I was just in the right place at the right time.”
He applied and was offered the job – the phone call coming in just as he was leaving the house to attend the Beechams interview. It wasn’t a hard decision for the 21-year-old Ed.
“I had a five-year research project contract with them in glacier chemistry, which involved collecting ice cores drilled out of the Antarctic ice and looking at the record of chemicals that are trapped in there. The study I was working on focused on the anthropogenic influences. I was looking at heavy metal levels trapped in the ice – lead, copper, cadmium and zinc – and profiling them. It had never been done before with any particular accuracy and we were able to build up some quite substantial profiles of how metal levels had changed. Many of them had increased with Man’s activity levels but by 1989 we were starting to see a dip in the lead levels as North America shifted to unleaded petrol.
“In a sense the Antarctic is a perfect laboratory and the records in the ice are unbelievably detailed – every nuclear bomb test, every volcano that has ever erupted – it’s all in there.”
The lab work at BAS’s Cambridge base was fascinating but the highlight was the opportunity to spend two summer field seasons in the Antarctic.
“The first time I sailed from Grimsby, working as supernumery crew on RRS John Biscoe. Having heard about all the amazing places my dad used to go to, here I was at the age of 22 going to Uruguay, Argentina, the Falkland Islands and then onto Antarctica.”
It was a fantastic, “character building” experience and Ed learned some invaluable life skills. “It exposed me to situation that were completely outside my comfort zone and also got me to work in teams and groups of people from all walks of life.”
When the five-year project came to an end, Ed was able to ease himself back into a more conventional career by spending six weeks assisting a glaciologist from the Scott Polar Research Institute on a project monitoring the melting of the Scott Turnerbreen glacier in Svalbard.
He still wanted to pursue a career that connected science and the natural world so when the Svalbard project ended he embarked on an MSc in soil science at Reading University.
“It was a different form of science in a sense but was still largely hand-on, dealing with the material,” he said. “And the brilliant thing about the MSc was that it was completely international, so I learned a lot about the world in that year and made some good friends.”
The plan was to combine his scientific knowledge and his field work experience in a job in a developing country but by the mid-1990s the Overseas Development Agency was shifting focus away from deploying British people abroad and towards training those countries’ indigenous populations – so Ed’s career path was at a crossroads.
“A scientific post at the BRE, connected to wood preservation, then caught my eye,” he said. “Not only did the job sound interesting but I was also struck by the size of the campus, the number of labs and all the activity that was going on. It really clicked with me in terms of getting stuck into practical science and working things out.”
He joined BRE’s Centre for Timber Technology as a chemist in wood preservation in 1995, just before the organisation was privatized.
“The integrity and independence of the BRE brand were key and it posed the question of how you achieve that in a private organisation,” said Ed. “Effectively there was a management buyout and the BRE is now owned by a charitable trust, which represents the construction and research sectors and maintains that independence.
“Any activities that BRE does make a profit on, the trust reinvests that money in education and training connected to the built environment. We have six university centres of excellence where the trust has paid for a professor, and various MScs and PhDs – 149 of the latter.”
Since privatisation the BRE has remained an environment that allows space and time to develop and test ideas and look at new options, said Ed. “It really does encourage the creative forces along with the scientific forces in terms of how we deliver for the sector and the UK.”
He added that it’s been fascinating to witness some of the early technology projects he worked on eventually find their way onto the market.
“One of the first projects I worked on was in collaboration with Bangor University on the different chemicals that could be used in acetylating wood and the properties they imparted. Of course, we know where that product is now because Accoya and Tricoya are out in the market.”
Ed combined further learning with work and in 2006 he completed a PhD on the stabilisation of wood surfaces and coatings at the University of Sussex. A year later he became director of the BRE’s Centre for Timber Technology, managing teams working on wider timber related projects such as engineering and utilisation, but still around the theme of durability and performance and all the while maintaining his hands-on connection with testing and researching.
Further “reshaping” of the BRE followed and in 2013 Ed took on his current role as research director in the BRE’s Centre for Sustainable Products, which looks at the environmental impact of materials and also at bio-based materials, particularly wood.
“Personally I think there are huge opportunities for wood in the future,” he said. “It’s a case of translating those social and environmental advantages and doing a positive thing rather than just reducing an impact or an emission.
“We’re currently at a really interesting stage of developing a new project on biophilic design. It’s a term that came up in the 1980s and essentially recognizes that humans have an inherent connection to nature. In its widest context biophilic design in a building improves the health and well being of occupants. What is more critical and interesting is the materials used and, of course, wood is a fantastic proxy for nature.”
BRE will refurbish a large office on its site this year and will monitor the 50 occupants six months before the refurbishment interventions and six months after. Ed is currently working on finding partners for the project and is excited about the possible outcome for timber.
His day-to-day work is varied but always includes some engagement with an existing project, either in a technical or management capacity. He also chairs a European Standards Committee on the performance classification of wood in construction, so is involved with “changing and improving practice in the wider world”.
The aforementioned “creative forces” at BRE continue to be motivational. “We’ve got international experts in lighting in buildings, acoustics, structural engineering and so on,” said Ed. “Being able to interface with those disciplines connecting to your particular field in order to create new opportunities for materials that have a positive impact on society is great.”
He added that the BRE had changed enormously in his time there, from a position where experts and researchers were supported by research funding and closely aligned to central government policy and direction, to one where if research is needed then, generally speaking, industry has to take the lead and pay for it.
He believes more change may be on the horizon as the UK leaves the EU and he is concerned about what may be lost in terms of scientific research and co-operation. “Many of the European nationals we employ here have worked at the BRE for decades and are concerned for the future.”
BRE aside, a recent highlight for Ed has been his role as an executive director of the Grown in Britain campaign.
“It connected me closely with the whole supply chain, whereas I’d been used to sitting at the product end,” he said. “It’s been great to get out and see how people are managing their forests and woodlands and seeing the benefits of the social value-adding aspects of forestry and wood. I’m interested in how we can connect more to the products that flow from forests so we can engage more with people about the value of selecting wood.”
Grown in Britain also opened Ed’s eyes to the power of social media. He set up and ran the campaign’s Twitter account, garnering 17,000 followers and was instrumental in gaining the support of Heal’s furniture and furnishing store in 2013.
On spotting some furniture in the window of Heal’s in Tottenham Court Road he tweeted a photo with the caption “wouldn’t it be brilliant if this was made from timber grown in Britain”. Within an hour he’d had an invitation to speak to the company about their plans and within four months Heal’s was hosting the launch event of the first Grown in Britain Week in October 2013 with a new range of English ash furniture.
“I used to think social media was a bit of a waste of time but now I realise it’s a powerful force that we could deploy much more in the timber sector.”
When Ed’s not working he likes to spend time with his wife, Clare and their three young children, Madeleine, Alex and James aged eight, six and two respectively.
“I love sharing the wonders of the natural world with the children and showing them the great outdoors,” he said.
One part of the natural world his family has only shared by proxy is the Arctic. In April last year, in what he insists was not a mid-life crisis, Ed joined a small expedition to the North Pole – and raised more than £50,000 for charity in the process.
“I’d been living in the same community in St Albans for 20 years and had young kids and I had this ‘social conscience’ moment,” he said. “At the same time I came across a small organisation that arranged expeditions to the North Pole every year. From a very young age I’ve had a fascination with the heroic age of Polar exploration and this made it accessible. I also realised I could align it with some fund-raising.”
A year of fund-raising – for Rennie Grove Hospice, Earthworks and Cancer Research – and getting fit preceded the eventual trek.
The former opened up a whole new world of engagement with the St Albans community, ranging from approaching national and local businesses, giving presentations at schools and organising a ‘polar bear plunge’ at an open air pool on New Year’s Day 2016 – an event so popular they repeated it this year.
“My wife was utterly brilliant with this and was the foundation behind the events. She called herself the Polar PA.”
The trek itself is covered in Ed’s blog at www.ed2northpole.org and makes fascinating reading. Temperatures of -42 degrees Celsius were endured, 24-hour daylight was tolerated, 70 kilo pulks were hauled and 7,000 calories of energy were burned a day in the two-week, 230km trek.
The experience was “totally immersive”, said Ed, but returning home to his family was “epic”. His efforts have also been rewarded by donations totalling £51,577 to date, some of which have been contributed by members of the timber industry, for which he is extremely grateful.
