Wildaroo Ventures in Sydney, Green Timber Technology in Orange and a host of other timber enthusiasts are trying to change the game for every environmentalist’s favourite material.
Whatever happened to that comforting idea, “The balance of nature”?
It’s long gone. In 1896, Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius was inspired to explain the Ice Ages’ repeated freezing and melting. He was the first to calculate the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide that influenced those climate changes. Arrhenius foretold a gradual human induced global warming, but he never imagined the vast volume of CO2 we emit by burning fossil fuels these days.
The United Nations Environment Programme reports that building and construction are key drivers of the climate crisis, contributing 34 per cent of global CO2 emissions. Carbon embodied in conventional construction materials, especially concrete and steel, make up about 11 per cent.
In Sydney, Jorn Wisselink founded Wildaroo Ventures to build sustainably in wood. The company brings in wood-building technology from the Netherlands to Australia, offering varied styles and building types ranging from student accommodation and affordable housing to senior living, build-to-rent, and eco-resorts.
Each timber module, generally a room, locks away about 32 tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime, counting the stored carbon in the timber plus the avoided emissions from the steel and concrete it replaces.
Modular housebuilding in Australia is 10 years behind countries in Europe, and there’s a double problem. Wisselink says “Australia is facing a generational housing shortfall at the same time as the built environment is under mounting pressure to decarbonise. Conventional construction is too slow, too expensive and too carbon-intensive to close either gap.”
The Australian Productivity Commission reported that building construction has been in the doldrums for at least 30 years. Labour productivity fell by 12 per cent since 1995. The time taken to complete a new detached house has risen significantly in 10 years, with average building time for apartments increasing by nine months.
The answer is already proven at scale in Europe: housebuilding modules made offsite, delivered onsite.
It’s the essence of modern methods of construction.
In a factory, timber for a building’s main structures – the floor, walls and roof – are cut very accurately by computer-controlled machine tools and then constructed on an assembly line as flat panels. Other components such as windows, doors, wiring and plumbing are added onto the panels. Packaged up, the whole building is delivered to the building site, where a small crew of construction workers quickly lock them together, exactly as designed by the architect. It’s far more efficient than sending raw materials to the building site and constructing the house in all weathers.
The Clean Energy Finance Corporation says using mass timber can cut construction-related embodied carbon by as much as 75 per cent compared to conventional steel and concrete.
Australia’s timber problems
Building with timber on a large scale plus wood chipping for paper and packaging can be the enemy of the nation’s forests, witness the long war between timber-getters and environmentalists.
In Tasmania in 2010, unionist Michael O’Connor, the CFMEU’s Forestry lead, called for a nation-wide deal. The only way, he said, was “to sit down with people we’ve been opposed to for 30 years…to secure green backing for an expansion of plantation forestry and encourage investment in value-added projects.”
The Australian Conservation Foundation strongly agreed. But there was negligible progress on it for 13 years.
In 2023, the first Albanese government appointed 15 leaders in industry, labour unions and the environment to resolve the problems and design a strategy. By 2024 the “strategy partners” reached agreement, calling it the Timber Fibre Strategy.
Federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Julie Collins enthusiastically announced the government’s Timber Fibre Strategy backed by solid funding. Its priorities include more extensive and well-managed forest plantations, offsite manufactured mass timber housing, new regional jobs, and the new research arm Australian Forest and Wood Innovations.
Diana Gibbs, then at Australian Forest Products Association and a co-chair of the 15 strategic partners, said “This is a win, win, win an exciting opportunity to support the important role of the forest products sector in Australia’s future – our sovereign capability. We provide sustainable timber products to replace plastics and carbon intensive building materials. And it’s not just for the climate and achieving net zero, but also to provide employment and value-adding in the regions.”
Green timber modular housing at Orange
In the New South Wales regional town of Orange in 2021, Pete Morrison founded Green Timber Technology (GTT) to make modular timber buildings. His career had started in large-scale mass timber projects in Germany and England. He then moved to Sydney, where he saw that mass timber projects were being sidelined. But for Morrison it was conventional building that was the problem, often slow and wasteful. GTT aims “to challenge the status quo and reinvigorate the construction industry,” he said.
To make mass timber modules, Morrison needed high-end robotic machine tools. He found them, unused and mothballed by a failed mass timber business. His company also needed a stream of orders from housing companies that believed in the benefits of offsite mass timber manufacturing, and he secured that too. GTT and property company White Picket Fence Holdings are in partnership to build around 100 homes.
Phil Leahy of White Picket Fence sees the benefits of offsite manufacture. “Working with GTT enables us to complete homes in around three months instead of six. It reduces onsite delays, with improved quality and timing… [It] will revolutionise the way our homes are designed and built.”
In Japan, the international engineering and design major Obayashi Corporation sees decarbonisation as a key mission to help build a sustainable future. It has expanded into forestry and mass timber manufacture. Construction of its 11-storey mass timber head office used age-old Japanese joinery techniques, which provide the flexibility needed to withstand earthquakes. The beautiful timber interiors have a natural appeal.
The building is a model for human-scale, mid-rise development. Obayashi’s strategic Wood Vision has inspired new low-carbon public buildings and many stylish dwellings.
Don’t underestimate timber. Tree-ring science in Japan shows that the central pillar of the Horyu-ji’s pagoda in Nara is 13 centuries old.
It’s time for timber. The building industry needs to change in method and materials before climate change forces change on us.
