Here’s a statistic for the Wood for Good campaign to conjure with in its efforts to publicise the sustainability of timber. According to the Finnish Forest Association, in just one day during the peak growing season Finland’s forests put on a staggering 1 million m3 of timber. Following the journalistic tradition of illustrating what a huge volume of something adds up to if you put it together in a lump, I’ve worked out that this equals 10 Albert Halls full of Finnish wood. So a week’s growth would fill the hall every day for the entire BBC Proms season.
This illustration of the industry’s inherent renewability might seem a bit fatuous. But given that so many media references to use of wood or paper give an estimate of what this equates to in terms of woodland or trees felled, and imply that it’s a bad thing, it’s just the sort of information fellow journalists and, indeed, the public need to be hit over the head with at every opportunity.
Timber’s sustainability story also benefits from another focus of this edition, the continuing market and technical advance of engineered wood products.
These both enhance the industry’s ability to take on and beat rival materials in terms of product performance and predictability and enable it to make even more comprehensive use of the raw material resource.
Developments in laminated timber beams and rafters look particularly exciting. There’s every indication the UK is set to follow the example of Continental Europe and use these products in increasingly adventurous and large-scale applications (and one French glulam company exhibiting at the Carrefour show recently completed a building with a 60m roof span). UK architects are also reportedly increasingly drawn to building with cross-laminated prefabricated timber panels which press all the right “modern methods of construction” buttons.
And just to reinforce the point, two days’ growth in Finland’s forests provides enough timber to create a stack a metre wide and deep running from London to Helsinki and back, with a bit left over.
