Summary
• Forestry Commission Scotland has published its Sustainable Construction Timber: sourcing and specifying local timber guide.
• This is intended to give specifiers an insight into the procurement of construction timber grown in the UK.
• It is founded on research into the properties of various species.

It’s an old cliché, but if I had a pound for every time an architect asks me why it isn’t possible to use UK-grown timber in construction I’d be a very wealthy man.

I’d also be very old, as it takes a while to respond to every enquiry of this sort simply because a series of myths and misconceptions have to be overcome before getting down to providing serious guidance.

A big step towards reducing the time involved – and getting useful reference material out to a wider industry audience – was taken with the publication by Forestry Commission Scotland of Sustainable Construction Timber: sourcing and specifying local timber.

Written by Ivor Davies of Napier University’s Centre for Timber Engineering (CTE), the guide takes specifiers by the hand through all of the issues involved in the procurement of UK grown timber and is a must-have for anyone seriously interested in getting material – on time and on budget – from reasonably close to the project location.

A guide of this sort can only be founded on sound knowledge of the timber resource available and over the past few years CTE, together with a number of partner organisations, has been involved in several studies intended to identify the properties of various species and their respective potential to deliver new, high added-value products.

Scots pine

Take Scots pine for example, for which a series of separate but related studies has recently been carried out by Forest Research, BRE and CTE.

The first of these looked at the production and main end uses of Scots pine grown in the north of Scotland; the second reviewed the market and product development prospects; whilst the third looked at the potential to improve the strength characteristics of the species through re-engineering. Together, these three studies provide the necessary body of knowledge on which further development work – and industry decisions – can be predicated.

The first study, by Forest Research, began with an industry survey to establish just how much Scots pine timber is processed in the north of Scotland, from which the volume of sawn timber and timber products was extrapolated. In 2005 (the year of the survey), 325,600m³ were harvested, of which 187,700m³ ended up as sawn timber or timber products.

Just over 50% of this volume was used in panel board products whilst nearly all of the sawn timber went to the fencing market. Only around 1-2% was used in higher added-value markets such as decking and sleepers, and while this equation can be seen to have some relationship to timber quality, the study provides a base line from which the only way is up.

Market opportunities

The second study, conducted by CTE, set out to evaluate new market opportunities and to explore ways in which existing markets might be expanded. With a primary focus on value-added and local processing, 13 potential products were assessed against 10 separate criteria using a scoring system of -10 to +10, a method that produced a prioritised order topped by garden and landscaping products.

This might seem a bit mundane given the underlying research involved, but it included a review of the ways in which thermal and chemical modification might add value to the products, again information on which industry investment decisions can be founded.

Curiously, post and beam buildings appear below playground equipment, fencing and acoustic barriers in the assessment process, but this is less surprising when you remember that the review primarily examined ways in which existing markets might be expanded. There is no substantive history of Scots pine post and beam buildings, but the opportunity exists and there clearly needs to be more research and development work.

The third study, by BRE, is the one that really shows the way forward for Scots pine, with lamination in its various forms (such as stress lamination, glue lamination and cross lamination) coming out strongly in the conclusions.

More work in this area is already under way with European funding, but in the end it will be the extent to which industry believes there is sufficient market size to justify UK production.

An old story, perhaps, but for once the knowledge base exists to allow sensible investment decisions to be made.