Evidence of meeting #88 for Natural Resources in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was buildings.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Acting Vice-President, Engineering, National Research Council of Canada
My recent statements and comments allude to the pan-Canadian framework on climate change. Numerous processes and different teams of people, as Phil pointed out.... The building code is focused on safety. It should be material agnostic and that's what the technical committees are focusing on.
We're working with NRCan, Natural Resources Canada, on the pan-Canadian framework where we are looking at the best practices through life-cycle analyses. The previous witnesses mentioned that this size is evolving all the time. It has come a long way in the last 10 to 15 years to assess everything that goes into a building or a car or any products to take into account the carbon footprint. It's not the building code. It's other.
For example, all the green growth initiatives that are being presented to Treasury Board. We're working closely with Public Works to assess the carbon footprint of downtown buildings here. There are numerous teams, a wide variety of initiatives.
Liberal
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Thank you to our witnesses for coming to committee today; you've made a very interesting presentation.
I was looking over and listening very carefully to your presentation. You mentioned that you work with your American counterparts. At what point are they along the journey that you've embarked on as far as endorsing tall-frame timber buildings?
Acting Vice-President, Engineering, National Research Council of Canada
The American counterpart I was alluding to is NIST, National Institute of Standards and Technology, which is one of our equivalents in the U.S. in terms of standards. They have facilities that complement ours in fire testing. We send our teams down there to carry out large-scale tests. We do have some of these facilities in Ottawa but they have complementary ones. A few weeks ago, we sent one of our teams down there to look at the fire resistance of structures of cross-laminated timber. We share the data from a science and technology point of view. We choose a model simply to help us minimize the cost to taxpayers and gain knowledge more quickly.
I cannot speak to their regulations or legislation. We're not looking at that. We're working with them strictly on the science and technology exchange, information knowledge exchange.
Do you want to add to that?
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
I can speak a little to the regulation piece. Canada is more advanced than the U.S. when it comes to construction of tall and mid-rise wood buildings. They look to us for a lot of the information. We have moved forward on this approach. We work very closely with both the Canadian Wood Council and the American Wood Council, and that information goes back and forth.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
In your research and in some of the tests that you've conducted with timber-frame buildings that are six storeys and greater, quite often in the presentations we've heard, we've had the Brock Commons referenced. It's nice that it's been built, but it's relatively new, and it really hasn't withstood the test of time. Obviously you've done enough research that you've endorsed the project or at least not adversely objected to the project or the facility being constructed.
Can you talk a little about some of the comparisons you've done and the testing you've conducted to ensure that a building like that is structurally sound?
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
Thank you for qualifying. We didn't endorse that building. The provincial government has the mandate to endorse the design, although we did work with some of their provincial counterparts on that design.
With regards to the structural testing, NRC has a wide spectrum of expertise. We carry out structural testing. We carry out seismic. We look at mould, expansion, climate change. All these factors are put into the provisions when we introduce them into the code. Over the last year alone, we probably conducted 50 tests on various elements, and all these features are put into the code.
We're fairly confident that it's going to withstand the Canadian environment, seismic zones, fire, and issues like that. We have expertise from probably the world's finest experts working on fire.
From a technical perspective, we believe it will function as well as, if not better than, any other building of any type of material, otherwise it would never go into the code.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
When you've done your carbon footprint analysis between the two different models of construction, or three—concrete, steel, and wood—when you've done the full analysis of the cost of production of materials, the life-cycle operation, and also the decommissioning of these buildings in the future, where does your analysis end, from a carbon footprint perspective?
Acting Vice-President, Engineering, National Research Council of Canada
It's very broad. It really depends, it's on a case-by-case basis. You have to look at one project at a time.
In general, one could say that using wood would actually help the carbon footprint, but you need to look at the whole project.
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
It may not always be the case. If you're located in an area next to a quarry and you have access to steel and cement, it may be better to use that product in that community. If you have to ship in your product, you have to take all of that into account, so it's very hard to say without looking at the geographic location.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
When you look at wood-frame, mass timber construction, what concerns would you have, based on your analysis and your research?
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
I'll just get the misconception out of the way. We're not looking at timber construction, we're looking at mass timber construction when we're talking about six storeys or 12 storeys. These function completely differently from other types of wood—two-by-four or two-by-eight type of construction.
The concerns we have are the same concerns we would have with a steel building or a concrete building: smoke travelling through the building in the event of a fire, fire spreading throughout that building, or the fire protection system is not operating. These are the same issues we would deal with regardless of the nature of the building.
We would also look at under construction, which is probably a little more risk than if you're going with the conventional concrete-steel type construction. Under construction would be one of the biggest risks, I think, for this type of construction.
The committees are doing a very good job of coming up with methods for building these safely, and reducing fire load around the site—security, fencing, and water supply. All these sorts of features are being incorporated under the construction mandate to, hopefully, reduce that risk. We won't get it to zero, but we'll reduce it.
Conservative
Ted Falk Conservative Provencher, MB
Just to follow up a little bit more on the decommissioning aspect of your presentation, I'll give you an example in a different industry. The electric car industry is cited as being very carbon-friendly and very green. One of the challenges that hasn't been adequately addressed when it comes to electric cars is what happens to those lithium batteries once their life cycle has been completed. That's going to potentially create an unmitigated burden on the industry at some point in time.
I'm just wondering, when it comes to the timber-frame construction that we're talking about here today, what are the potential flies in the ointment, so to say, when it comes to decommissioning, or the potential adverse effects that we could be looking at?
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
I can't think of any adverse effects. With CLT, for example, you can decommission and reuse a CLT beam or column. So you're not taking it and chopping it up and reusing it, you're using the entire beam again—if you wish to use it again.
I can't think of any adverse effects that are different from any other type of building. There are elements within that building that are going to be recycled, there are elements that will not be recycled, similar to any other types of building.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Thank you for your presentation and for being here for us.
You mentioned encapsulated mass timber construction and how some of your tests are around exposed mass timber construction. You face the architects. We had Michael Green here before us in a previous study. He is one of the leading architects on mass timber and he is very much a proponent of exposing that mass timber for aesthetic purposes. He understands the caution people feel around encapsulating mass timber components in large buildings, such as Brock Commons, with gypsum board for extra safety. We also heard from the firefighters regarding their concerns after the building is built, that people will modify the interior construction by taking out chunks of that gypsum board to put holes in walls, or whatever. Michael Green, I think, would say that it doesn't matter.
I'm just wondering if you could comment on your studies and how they would answer that question: Is that gypsum board necessary all the time or does the exposed mass timber work just as well?
Acting Vice-President, Engineering, National Research Council of Canada
I can start quickly. I'll go back to the comments that Phil made earlier about the tests we are carrying out, just to give you a bit of the detail perhaps. For example, we have here in Ottawa facilities where we are basically duplicating apartments and rooms. We're building the four walls with openings, typical openings.
We have a series of architectural designs, some with timber exposed and some without, and we're basically putting thermocouple sensors all over the place, monitoring the temperature rise and temperature evolution in different conditions with different amounts of timber exposed, to get all the data to be able to feed that back to the technical committees who will look at this and then make recommendations to the commission. We're providing the data. Of course, gypsum will have an impact, but we are there just to provide the knowledge, the scientific basis for decisions.
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
To that point, the last four tests that we conducted over the last two months alone looked at varying degrees of exposed wood, for that reason. We know that architects are going to want to have nice beams exposed, so we've looked at anywhere from 30% to 40% exposed. The tests that we were talking about where they self-extinguish were exposed beams, exposed columns, and exposed walls. They're performing quite well.
Obviously, that data still has to be analyzed and given to the committees, and they can make a decision, but the codes will look at providing a provision that says you can have up to 30% of an exposed wall, exposed wood, and x amount of exposed ceiling. That will be spelled out in the code, based on the results of this test. If somebody pops a hole and removes some of the gypsum board, it's probably going to be factored into that table.
NDP
Richard Cannings NDP South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC
Right. We also heard from the firefighters their concerns that these tests are carried out with a couple of apartments that are built. You know, you're not building 12-storey buildings. Could you comment on how you mimic the pressures on the beams, and so on, to go to the fire safety, when you set these on fire and you want a three-hour or four-hour safety period when firefighters can be in there? How do you test how that would perform when there are 12 storeys on top of it?
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
Generally, you would never build a 12-storey building and burn it.
Director, Research and Development, Construction, National Research Council of Canada
The fire's not going to start there. You're going to have an area of fire origin, and that fire is going to be contained within a compartment.
What the committees do or what the researchers do is build a fire compartment, as would typically be seen in terms of what's currently required under the code. Usually, when you build buildings, they're compartmented by floor, at the very least, and sometimes they're compartmented by rooms. We take an area that's indicative of what would be built, and we conduct the fire in that area.
If that fire were to breach that area, then we would do the calculations to determine what would happen when it reached the second fire compartment. It's not generally going to go from this compartment to the next, all the way through.
We do have plans over the next two years to actually build a six-storey building outside and burn it. We will be taking data from that and using that in our codes. We haven't gotten to that stage, but we're comfortable with the information that's coming back now, just with the compartmentalized non-sprinkler tests that we're conducting.
