Are Wood Skyscrapers the Solution to Our Climate and Housing Crises?

 In a TED talk delivered earlier this year, Green discusses his belief that wood is the environmentally-responsible answer to urbanization. He makes the case that we have two options to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: reduce the amount of emissions we produce and/or find ways to store those emissions. Wood, Green argues, is the only material that allows builders to do both:

• Steel production accounts for 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Concrete production accounts for 5%.
• 1 cubic meter of wood stores 1 metric ton of CO2; wood-based building products continue to sequester carbon until they burn or decompose.
• North American forests grow the wood needed to build a 20-story building every 13 minutes.

Green’s idea—building 30-story wood structures—is the first new idea to hit skyscraper (10 stories or more) construction in over one hundred years. As with any radical systemic change, opposition and challenges are prevalent.

The majority of building codes restrict the height of wood buildings to four stories to lessen the potentially detrimental impact of factors such as fire, high wind, earthquakes and termites. Green argues the use of large, solid-wood structural panels called cross-laminated timber (CLT) to build tall buildings mitigates these concerns. CLT is an attractive product to the forest industry as small-diameter, low-value trees as well as trees killed by insects and disease can be used in its manufacture.

Today, the world’s tallest wood building stands at 10-stories. Located in Melbourne, Australia, the building is comprised of 23 apartments and was completed earlier this year. A nine-story wood apartment building with 29 units has stood in London, England since 2009. Additional wood buildings, ranging from six to 30-stories are proposed across Canada, Norway, Sweden and Austria.

Green takes the stance it is not only possible to build more wooden buildings like these, but it is also necessary. Opening a market for sustainably-sourced wood will increase the value of forests across the globe. Considering the economic and environmental benefits, the question of using wood in tall buildings quickly becomes, “Why not?”

To learn more about building with wood in the United States, visit WoodWorks.