Thank you for the opportunity to meet today. My name is Peter Moonen. I'm the national sustainability manager for the Canadian Wood Council. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the wood council, but we essentially provide technical support to designers and architects, and we represent the industry to that sector. Our principal job is to inspire, enable, support, promote, and recognize excellence in wood design.
I'm going to start with an area that I'm sure you're very familiar with: environment. We're facing a lot of different environmental imperatives: forest management, climate change, carbon footprint, and energy efficiency. I'm going to concentrate on where wood is, but I'd like you to think of a very simple acronym that I think demonstrates the attributes of wood. It's 4S: sustainable forestry, sink, sequester, and substitute. Those sum up the values that wood offers to the built environment.
Canada takes great pride in sustainable forestry. That's the first S. We have more certified forests than do the next four countries combined: Russia, U.S., Sweden, and Australia. I think you all know that our forests are sustainably managed, but they also act as a carbon sink. That's the second S. I know there are many researchers in the CFS who evaluate the carbon emissions from all sources, including forests. I work with them on a fairly regular basis.
The third S is “sequester”. When wood is used, it takes the carbon that those trees put into the wood and locks it up for as long as the wood remains intact. That's an important factor when we're designing our structures. I'll get into the fifth area, time, in a minute or so. By designing enduring and adaptable structures, we can actually extend the carbon cycling so the CO2 that is stored in the wood is kept out of the atmosphere.
The fourth S is “substitute”. You can also consider that to be avoided emissions, which is just as valid as buying an electric car to avoid future emissions. When you build with wood, you avoid the emissions that might have come about from a more carbon-intense material. There's no perfect material, but I think wood offers some very significant opportunities in the carbon realm.
The other aspect that is often overlooked when it comes to carbon is the matter of time. Since greenhouse gas effects are cumulative over time, both impacts and benefits accrue over the long term. I'm sure that most of you have a retirement plan. You can look at the carbon benefits or the carbon impacts in the same way as the money that we put into a retirement plan to grow and accrue over time. It's the same with carbon impacts or the carbon benefits. When we make our carbon savings is just as important as how we make them.
Wood is an incredibly interesting and wonderful material, and it enhances the abilities of architects, designers, and builders to build high-performing buildings. I'm going to focus most of my attention on the structural use of wood and the buildings into which it goes.
It can reduce energy use because of its thermal properties. It doesn't transfer heat very well. When you're designing a high-efficiency building that is trying to achieve a passive house level or net-zero energy, that thermal transfer is important. I think you've probably all put your hand up against a window in the winter and found that it's cold. If you put your hand up against wood, it's probably not cold because it doesn't transfer that heat. That's going to be important, because, as building codes move towards net-zero, passive house, or super E, we're going to have to pay attention to those little details about things like how we make our building envelopes airtight, how we make them thermally efficient, and how we design and build buildings that are comfortable, functional, and healthy to live in. Wood plays a role in all of that.
The carbon aspects of wood are being recognized by governments all around the world. I know that the national building strategy is recognizing carbon. The City of Vancouver has a carbon footprint requirement so that any new development has to report its carbon emissions, not just its operational carbon. This is in an effort to achieve net-zero carbon and net-zero energy.
We're undergoing a huge change from rural to urban, and that is putting a lot of pressure on cities. It's causing densification. It's causing change in how we build, where we build, and what we build with, so it poses a lot of challenges to the construction sector, which is arguably the largest industrial sector on the planet.
Canada is facing trades and skills shortages. Speed of construction is an issue, as are cost, precision, and building quality, which are necessary for high performance. A lot of those things can be addressed by prefabrication, which is an area in which wood excels in Europe, and one that is growing in North America and being recognized by contractors as an important component of future construction. As I say, it poses opportunities for wood.
I have some materials here, which I'm going to pass around. Aside from one product, they're all manufactured in Canada and they all present different opportunities for either the structure or the building envelope.
These first two products are part of heavy timber. There's laminated veneer lumber and TimberStrand, which is another form of an engineered wood product. They are increasingly being used in tall wood to be used in place of steel or concrete. They're very fire-resistant. They have been used in mid-rise construction around the country and in innovative green buildings at UBC and in Ontario, and we're seeing many more mass timber products being used.
I have three items that are actually non-structural products. They are wood fibre-based insulation. When I first heard of that I thought, “Why would you put that in a wall? It's just going to burn.” If I had a propane torch here, I could try to light the product, and it would not burn. It would char, but it would not burn.
There is research being done at FPInnovations, and we're putting this into buildings across the country, because it's not only a wood product but also a very efficient insulation product.
Building envelopes are going to be increasingly important. Wood plays a great role in those. There are many passive house buildings and mid-rise buildings in Vancouver that use wood because of its thermal properties and its ease of fabrication. It can be precision manufactured. It's a superlative product for what we will be trying to achieve over the next little while.
What's needed? One of the things we find most frustrating is that architects and engineers are not informed about wood. They don't take it in school. We need to incorporate that knowledge into learning for existing practitioners and contractors as well as for our future professionals. To my mind, every architect and engineer and contractor should have a comprehensive understanding of materials so that they know how they can merge, how we can have composite systems. To do otherwise is sort of like teaching a gourmet chef how to cook but not teaching them anything about vegetables. I think it's important that we educate our designers if we want to have these buildings.
There needs to be some research into advanced design on prefabrication, on understanding how materials can be combined to make the most efficient structures.
We also need to raise our skill levels in prefabrication, in hybrid design systems, and in retrofitting and renovation. The biggest change we can make for energy performance is to retrofit existing buildings and not just build all new buildings to net zero. That's a tough task, but I think it's an area where wood can excel because, again, of its thermal properties and its ease to be machined to tight tolerances.
We also need to have performance-based material evaluation in our codes. The wood today is not our grandfather's two-by-fours. It's very different. As you can see, these are products that weren't around 20 years ago. We need to upgrade our building codes to reflect the true performance capabilities. Don't put wood in a situation where it's going to fail, but recognize that it can do more things than we thought 20 or 30 years ago.
One hundred years ago most of Canada's buildings were based in wood. At the turn of the century, about 10 years after the Eiffel Tower was built, people started building with steel. In the thirties they started building with concrete. Michael Green is a friend of mine, and he's always saying that wood is undergoing a renaissance.
I think the 20th century may have been the century for concrete and the 19th century might have been the century for steel, but I think the 21st century is going to see the rise of wood, and I'd like to see that happen. I think Canada is in an excellent position to be a world leader in that.
Thank you.