The Berkeley Wood Lab’s research on mass timber production has the potential to improve California’s sustainability by sourcing from local forests.
The lab is collaborating with Northern Californian lumber company Mad River Mass Timber, or MRMT. The company will use Californian trees that otherwise would have either been turned into woodchips or burned in a forest fire to build panels that can be used in new housing and commercial buildings. This is the first time these types of panels will be produced locally in California instead of being shipped in from other countries.
The technology to create dowel-laminated timber, or DLT, has existed for decades, but the Berkeley Wood Lab adapted it for use in Californian forests. Through the process of making DLT, glue is not required, which enables the timber to be recycled in the future and turned into new material.
“(Finding) a way to thin out small diameter trees and give them value, instead of letting them languish within the forest will help our local California ecosystems, not just from forest fires, but also from the spread of different types of beetles that will get in and infest trees and kill them off,” said Sarah Gunawan, a research associate at UC Berkeley and member of the Wood Lab team.
According to American Forests, the oldest national nonprofit conservation organization in the United States, California forests have been mismanaged for years, resulting in densely populated forests where trees can become diseased and dry, which increases wildfire risk. UC Berkeley assistant professor Paul Mayencourt, a lead researcher at the Berkeley Wood Lab, said the lab sought to encourage the harvesting of trees in a way that allows “the forest to be healthy again.”
“There’s lots of effort around looking at using lesser utilized species (of trees) that are not the traditional materials that you would choose in commercial mass timber. So we’re really in favor of seeing this happen,” said Iain Macdonald, director of Pacific Northwest Mass Timber Tech Hub.
According to Mayencourt, growing trees store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and when a tree is used as building material, carbon can be stored in its wood for hundreds of years, when it otherwise would have released that carbon after burning or decomposing.
“I think (this is) a first good step toward having a greener low carbon construction in California that is conscious about the forest needs,” Mayencourt said. “Mad River Mass Timber is a really important milestone in this newer bioeconomy direction that California is taking and hopefully will lead the way for more adoption of sustainable construction in general.”