Mass timber is poised to become the fastest-growing building material over the next century, with demand for timber buildings expected to grow exponentially over the next 50 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As it stands, mass timber makes up just 1% of the North American building materials market<\/a>, but that will soon change according to Michael Barnard, climate futurist, strategist, and author, who projects that cross laminated timber systems will rise at the same time that global cement will decline.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n “We harvest roughly 3.5 billion cubic meters of wood every year,” Me Barnard said, who said that “we can displace an enormous amount of cement by simply diverting just a subset of single-use wood and paper products to engineered timber,” including cross laminated timber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, while we are accustomed to thinking that cross-laminated timber is a modern technology\u2014an antithesis of carbon-heavy materials like Portland cement\u2014the patent dates back more than 100 years, according to Andrew Dunn, organiser of Australia’s TimberConstruct conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Cross laminated timber is often thought to be a modern technology,” Mr Dunn said, “but the patent describing the technology dates back to 1923, in Washington State, in the Pacific Northwest.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cross-laminated timber, or CLT, is a mass timber product that uses layers of kiln-dried dimension wood oriented at right angles to one another and then glued to form structural panels. By gluing layers of wood at right angles, the panel delivers excellent structural rigidity in both directions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n