As a mature, high-income western economy, we face a practical conflict between our living standards and the over-use of raw materials
The Global Footprint Network has created the concept of Earth Overshoot Day. It marks the point each year when humanity’s resource consumption surpasses what the planet can replenish. Each country has its own date, reflecting what would happen if the world consumed resources at that country’s rate.
For the UK, it falls on 20 May. That means for more than half the year we are using up finite resources that will not be replenished.
In short, we are consuming too much “stuff” and depleting the metals, fuels and minerals we dig up: lithium, oil and gas, coal, limestone and more. When these run short, our economy suffers and living standards fall. We have been there before. Many will remember the miners’ strikes of the 1970s and the three-day week that followed.
The only way out of this dilemma is to innovate, to meet demand more efficiently or to find renewable ways of producing the same results.
We have already begun in energy, replacing fossil fuels with wind turbines and photovoltaic cells. In some cases, we are making better products with less material. But progress is rarely straightforward. Cars, for example, have steadily grown heavier and larger: so-called “autobesity”. According to Wikipedia, the average weight of cars sold in Europe rose by 21% between 2001 and 2022, partly due to the heavy battery packs carried by electric vehicles.
The construction industry matters
Construction is estimated to consume around half of all global materials. If that is even close to the truth, our industry carries enormous responsibility, and with it an equally large opportunity to set an example.
There are already many things we can do:
- Use more organic, self-renewing materials.
- Recycle and re-use, building a stronger second-hand market in materials.
- Restore and update existing buildings.
- Keep improving the efficiency of the built environment.
Some of this is already happening, but performance in the UK remains patchy. Our overshoot date is proof enough.
We need to be much more rigorous in our approach to sustainability. It is not a “nice to have”, it is essential. And we can achieve it without trading off cost or quality. Done properly, sustainable buildings should be better: warmer, more efficient, and more sympathetic to their surroundings.
Nature’s technology
One obvious step is to substitute natural, sun-grown materials that replenish themselves for manufactured ones that do not. This is hardly new. For centuries, people built with timber, straw, horsehair, even cow dung.
At Lamella we work with timber, specifically mass timber, which includes Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), Laminated Veneered Lumber (LVL) and Glulam. These are engineered products, updated for the 21st century, designed to beautify, simplify and speed up the build. They are manufactured offsite, cut precisely to size, and delivered as panels or beams ready for rapid assembly. An ancient material, delivered with the efficiencies of modern construction.
Mass timber is sourced from strictly regulated commercial forests. Our main supplier plants three saplings for every tree harvested. Fed by sunlight, water and carbon dioxide, those saplings grow into trees that give us oxygen and provide an extraordinarily strong and adaptable building material. A cycle of renewal powered by nature.
As CLT, timber becomes a cost-effective way of building strong, airtight, sustainable structures that can match or surpass brick, block, steel and concrete – none of which can ever replenish organically.
The circular economy
Timber, once engineered, sits naturally within the emerging circular economy. It grows without our help, and once cut and used, it can be reused again.
Most of us will have had a shed or something built from reclaimed timber. It looks good, works well, and costs nothing. CLT is more sophisticated, granted, but the principle is the same. Because panels are fixed with screws and brackets, they can be dismantled and reused. Concrete and brick, by contrast, are reduced to rubble at huge energy cost.
The UK’s stock of mass timber buildings is still small, so a second-hand market has yet to develop. But it will. Reclaimed panels could suit self-builders, or whole structures could be taken down and reassembled elsewhere at a fraction of the cost of new. We once designed a Welcome Centre intended to be dismantled and rebuilt every few years, which was sadly never built, but it showed the potential.
Build to renew, not consume
Mass timber belongs in two circular economy stories. First, it is an organic material that regrows, so what we use is replenished. Second, it can be reused after a building’s life, creating future markets in reclaimed CLT.
The greater our use of mass timber, the further we can push back Earth Overshoot Day. And perhaps one day we will be able to say the UK builds without depleting the planet.
Build. Grow. Breathe
The post Mass timber is the perfect circular economy building material appeared first on Planning, Building & Construction Today.
