Will mass-timber production follow?
There’s a sentiment circulating within the construction industry, says Jennifer Shakun, director of the New England Forestry Foundation’s Bioeconomy Initiative, about how there are plenty of tree huggers in the world, and nobody wants to throw their arms around a steel column. Enter a building made with mass timber instead of steel beams, though, and the sensation is a bit like walking into a manufactured forest, amid the attractive grain and luster of exposed wood. “It makes for a really nice, warm space,” says Shakun, who advocates for sustainable forestry. “Just having natural materials makes a huge difference in what can feel like a very sterile environment.”
The inherent appeal of wood over steel is one reason for the growing demand for mass timber. A bigger reason is that it’s environmentally friendlier than other construction materials. Lately, mass timber has started finding its way into some prominent Maine edifices. In 2023, Bowdoin College opened Barry Mills Hall and the John and Lile Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies, the state’s first two commercial structures to rely on mass timber. A number of other buildings across Maine are following suit, including the expanded Portland Museum of Art and Acadia National Park’s new Gateway Center, in Trenton.
Mass timber is a catch-all phrase for a variety of engineered beams, pillars, and panels. It’s made by bonding planks or wood strands together—variously with adhesives, nails, and screws—to create longer, sturdier structural components (“mass” was shortened from “massive”). Mass-timber beams are so strong that they can substitute for steel beams in buildings up to 25 stories, which is the height of the world’s tallest mass-timber building, a luxury apartment tower in Milwaukee. Unlike steel and cement (together, those two industries are responsible for about 16 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions), trees are a renewable resource, and they store carbon that only gets emitted back into the atmosphere if they burn or rot. “We know how to build properly to make sure that does not happen,” says Ben Herzog, who manages the wood-composites lab at the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center. “So one of the benefits of mass timber, from an ecological standpoint, is that our buildings are becoming carbon sinks.”
Mass timber has the added benefit of being a speedy material to work with. Component parts of a project are factory-made to requisite specifications and can be pieced together easily. “It’s very quick,” Herzog says. “You don’t need a lot of labor on the job site, because most of the work is done in the mill setting.” Plus, as with other prefabricated building materials, there’s less waste than if cutting has to happen on-site.
However, all the Maine buildings currently incorporating mass timber have had one challenge in common: they haven’t been able to source mass timber from Maine. Instead, it came from Europe or from factories in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. Considering that Maine is the most forested state in the country and that harvesting and processing timber is a major industry, that might come as something of a surprise. But nowhere in the entire Northeast is there a mass-timber manufacturer. Two companies announced intentions to start production in Maine shortly before the pandemic, but lower labor and lumber costs drew one plant to Alabama, while a tax lien on a former mill site scrapped the opening of the other. Now, though, demand in the marketplace is approaching the level to lure a manufacturer here, New England Forestry Foundation deputy director Andrea Colnes says.
The mass-timber industry originated in Europe in the 1980s, and the first multistory residential building using the material went up in Austria in 1998. The technology migrated across the Atlantic slowly. The first U.S. conference on mass timber didn’t take place until 2016. Shakun says a couple of hundred people attended. Now, the event draws thousands of people working in forestry, research, manufacturing, and construction, and the University of Maine’s Advanced Structures and Composites Center is among the institutions working to bring a mass-timber manufacturer to Maine. Recently, the center partnered with manufacturers to test various types of mass timber made from Maine wood types—softwoods like spruces, firs, and pines are generally preferred for their strength-to-weight ratio and workability, and those species regenerate faster than hardwoods. The tests led to the conclusion that the product “can compete with anything else in the world,” Herzog says.
By the end of last year, 2,664 mass-timber buildings had either been constructed or were in the works across the country, according to the WoodWorks Innovation Network, a nonprofit group promoting mass timber. Colleges and universities have been the primary early adopters in New England, Colnes says, but mass timber is ideal for four-story to 12-story apartment buildings. Herzog says demand is starting to pick up for single-family homes. Herzog believes it won’t be long before mass-timber manufacturing arrives. “Maine has the resources, the feedstock, the mills, the labor, and we have the knowledge,” he says. “I’m still extremely bullish. It’s going to happen. It’s really just a matter of when.”