Finnish giant Stora Enso has become the 21st organisation to join the EU-funded Build-in-Wood consortium, which promotes wood as a building material to replace concrete and steel in order to help prevent climate catastrophe.
With experience in prefabrication, building physics and timber building components, it will help the initiative develop timber building systems, one of the consortium’s work streams.
It replaces outgoing Norwegian partner Splitkon, who is leaving the project owing to to “changed priorities following Covid-19”, the consortium said.
“We believe that everything that is made from fossil-based materials today can be made from a tree tomorrow,” said Sebastián Hernández Maetschl, the company’s building concepts manager.
He added: “This sets an especially tough challenge for our buildings, which should also be produced completely from renewable materials and become a corner stone of the circular economy of the future.
Stora Enso supplied components for Finland’s tallest wooden building, Joensuu Lighthouse, a 50-metre-high tower with 117 student flats in Joensuu, eastern Finland.
Two thousand cubic metres of wood went into building the 14-storey-tall tower, including the lift shafts. That represents some 2,000 tons of CO2 sequestered from the atmosphere, said Build-in-Wood.
Coordinated by the the Danish Technological Institute, the €10m Build-in-Wood initiative began in 2019 and runs until the autumn of 2023. Hailing from 11 countries, consortium members are universities, architects, material suppliers, contractors and consultants working on 10 work streams including building systems, business development, sustainability assessment and performance documentation.
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