What makes timber

Timber from hardwoods tends to be more dense than softwoods, though there are exceptions. Softwoods come from coniferous trees such as pine, fir, spruce and larch. These trees take around 40 years to grow before they are ready to harvest. Hardwoods come from broadleaved trees such as oak, ash and beech.

These trees take much longer to grow, up to years before they are ready to harvest. Every part of a tree can be used to make different products at the sawmill. The parts we leave behind rot down to create soils that feed the next generation of forests. The trunk of the tree is sawn into pieces to make beams, planks and boards.

These are used in construction work, such as timber framed buildings, fencing and floorboards, in furniture or made into pallets.

Branches, tops of trees and smaller trees can be used as wooden posts, or are chipped and pressed to make manufactured boards. These boards are used for flooring, roofing, partitions and flat-pack furniture. Ours is all wood. This is a project that carries, in Finland, shades of a national religion. These forests, like those of so-called production forests or working forests around the world, from Karelia to the Carolinas, form the base of an enormous industrial pyramid, the foundation of a staggering array of consumer products of which mass timber is only the latest.

Forests are now asked to produce a long list of things that, in an era of growing concern over fossil fuels, is increasing in turn. That means you will find trees in all sorts of unexpected products, beyond the whole trees that go into toilet tissue and paper towels. There is the factory just outside Joensuu that renders spruce pulp into fibers that can be woven like cotton, which is a pesticide- and water-intensive crop that competes with food for land. There is the tampon and diaper fluff made from young yellow pine in the U.

Southeast, and a small but rapidly growing market in compressed wood pellets from countries in the Baltic States and the Southeast, sold to European power plants as an ecologically friendly replacement for coal. No one ever talks materials. Like many mass-timber designers, Klein was first attracted to the medium for ecological reasons.

Concrete and steel—each of which requires several rounds of breaking, grinding, and in the case of steel melting rocks—cost of a great deal of energy and therefore carbon dioxide emissions. The manufacture of steel, which accounts for around 5 percent of all emissions , releases nearly twice its weight in CO 2. The spruce logs below Joensuu, like the overstocked production forests of Oregon and North Carolina, were largely made of carbon the trees had pulled from the atmosphere.

That means that mass timber, in theory, could store that carbon long-term in the walls of buildings. But over time, in addition to the carbon savings, Klein came to think wood was simply a better material for many purposes, one that would allow a new generation of light, strong structures resistant to fire and explosion.

Mass timber advocates say it is far denser and more fireproof then the kinds of wood used to create structures like Notre Dame, built from 1,year-old trees that burned effortlessly when the cathedral caught fire in April Read about the threats facing Notre Dame and other World Heritage sites. There is cross-laminated timber CLT , which looks like inch-thick strips of heartwood arranged like a Jenga set to produce a block that is pretty much the definition of the word solid.

Or glu-lam , used to make structural beams that are like extremely strong plywood, and LVL —laminated veneer lumber—which makes excellent heavy beams and had formed the skeleton of the apartment building. Klein envisions a future urbanization boom like the one he saw in China in the early s, when he worked at breakneck speed designing high-rises as cities like Shanghai filled in to accommodate the millions moving there.

But for all the hype around mass timber, only a few U. Which means, for now, that if you want to build a CLT building, you have to order the materials from Europe, from factories like Binderholz in the stunning Zillertal Valley in the Austrian Alps. Now it is an empire, transformed by the decision of subsequent generations of Binders to commit the family to mass timber, which today it makes into a dizzying array of products in its 13 factories, from glulam to load-bearing solid-wood panels.

Perhaps it seems odd that architects in the U. This means, first, competition. Second, all of this, from the quickest-used toilet paper to the longest-lasting mass-timber beam, is coaxed from the land by the sort of meticulous control of forests that may no longer be desirable—or even possible.

Just across the German border from Binderholz, year-old Bavarian forester Albrecht Von Bodelschwingh walks through a German production forest to show me how they had ensured the supply of wood without denuding the landscape. In the 19th century, Heinrich Cotta instituted a rigorous system of strict volumetric analyses, so that landowners—and the state—would always know how much timber was on hand. Landowners had to submit outlooks to the state every year for their forests, detailing their plans 10 years out.

These woods are heavier and more durable, but also slower growing, therefore tend to be more expensive than softwoods. Oak, maple, walnut, cherry, and poplar are common choices for higher-end furniture. Less expensive softwoods used for furniture include pine, redwood, spruce, and cedar. Scrap and waste material from mills such as wood shavings and sawdust are combined with adhesives to create chipboard, Light Density Fiberboard LDF , Medium Density Fiberboard MDF , and other wood products that can be used to make inexpensive wooden furniture sold and shipped as ready-to-assemble items or furniture parts.

Timber is used in applications requiring the support of loads, including on docks , piers, jetties, railway or railroad track ties , or telephone and utility poles , for example. There is also widespread use in timber home construction, where the characteristic of this style is the use of timber that is generally greater than 5 inches in size.

In some applications, the timber may be left in its natural state including tree bark for design or aesthetic reasons. Other uses of timber include landscape timbers for retaining walls or other decorative purposes, and boat timbers , for cases where wooden boat construction is still valued. A wide variety of paper products are created using pulpwood from timber.

Trees are a bit like Goldilocks: They want conditions that are just right. Even when trees do have the necessary climatic conditions, they can be hurt by natural processes such as pest infestations. One serious pest, for instance, is the mountain pine beetle Dendroctonus ponderosae , a black insect roughly the size of a grain of rice. This menace has ravaged more than , square kilometers , square miles of forest in the western United States and Canada.

Another threat to forests is fire. Lightning strikes from thunderstorms can set entire forests ablaze, and heavy winds can quickly spread a fire. Forest fires have become an increasingly frequent occurrence in the western United States, though they are often started by people—sometimes even intentionally by arsonists.

Forestry experts point out that fires have always been part of the natural cycle in forests. However, as drought and high temperatures have become more common, forest fires are becoming larger and more dangerous. Less common phenomena affecting forests include landslides, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions.

In May of , the explosive eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington State sent out a shockwave that toppled thousands of trees and stripped others of their branches. The eruption also triggered a series of volcanic mudflows that ripped trees from the ground and scattered them across the landscape.

Human activities take a serious toll on forests. Some forests are clear-cut—completely cut down—for timber, to make room for new trees, or to simply clear the land for another purpose. When new trees are planted, they are often selected because they grow rapidly and because their resources—wood or fruit, for example—can be harvested and sold. In other cases, clearcutting is done to make room for grazing livestock.

Clearcutting is occurring in many regions, from the northwestern United States to South America to Africa, and it can be devastating for forest ecosystems in many ways.

In addition to being an eyesore, swaths of razed forest are more susceptible to erosion because tree roots are no longer holding the soil in place. Furthermore, clearcutting reduces the diversity of animals because a large portion of their habitat has been destroyed and they must flee to find new shelter. Clearcutting is also harmful to the millions of indigenous people around the globe who live in or near forests, and many of these people rely on forests for their food, shelter, and even their livelihoods.