Shiver Mass Timber
Beautiful, sustainable, inclusive growth
Mastercard is one of the great corporate pioneers of sustainable, inclusive growth, under the leadership of its former CEO. He was just nominated by the U.S. to be the new President of the World Bank:
"In 2014, w/ Ajay Banga as CEO, Mastercard launched the nonprofit Center for Inclusive Growth to “advance equitable and sustainable economic growth and financial inclusion around the world.” (He) championed these ideas before they became fashionable"
McKinsey is centering its work for its 5,000 global clients on sustainable, inclusive growth. The World Bank will now, too.
This focus is critical to catalyze the trillions we need to dedicate to climate.
These investments present extraordinary growth opportunities. The $80 billion of place-based Federal funding will accelerate the growth of entire ecosystems, as Secretary Raimondo said this week;
The research, innovation, and manufacturing sparked by this law can enable us to be the technological superpower, securing our economic and national security future for the coming decades.
One of the unexpected opportunities emerging from our global commitment to sustainable, inclusive growth is to reignite sustainable industries.
One of those is Mass Timber, which is growing as a building materials sector at meteoric rates, and will be a $4 bill industry in the U.S. shortly. Europe has led the way.
Mass timber is a sophisticated engineering process which turns wood into a building material as strong as concrete or steel, with greater fire protection characteristics than those, at 20% the weight of either, and with > 50% better carbon capture properties. At a net lower (it’s much easier to build with MT than with cement or steel) price. The climate opportunity is huge;
"Mass timber could cut 14%-31% of global CO2 emissions and 12%-19% of global fossil fuel consumption ... 8 billion tons of CO2 emissions could be cut by 2050 if 90% of new urban buildings were constructed with mass timber."
While mass timber developed as a valuable output of healthy forest and watershed management first in Europe, it’s become the go-to solution for beautiful biophilic (wood makes you happy – “I want to caress the lift!” ) buildings.
Denver was the first U.S. city to adopt international standards that currently support mass timber building up to 270 feet. The City has over 50 Mass Timber projects built or under development. One of the tallest MT buildings in America will break ground in RiNo this summer.
We’ve formed a broad coalition to understand how to grow a mass timber industry in Colorado. The business is booming in the Southeast and Northwest; Oregon recently received a $41 million build back better grant from the Department of Commerce to focus on building a mass timber affordable housing industry. British Columbia is moving fast.
Mass timber offers a rare value quadfecta. Healthy forests and watersheds; substantially reduced carbon in buildings; beautiful structures; and new, family-supporting career jobs in urban and also rural areas of the State. And a possible fifth value (a pentagonia of value? ) – a wonderful climate-enhancing material to scale our affordable housing needs, particularly for rural workforces and urban multi-family developments. Entire cities of mass timber are underway,
including Wood City , a sustainable design and urban living quarter of Helsinki.
Every opportunity starts as a challenge. Colorado — and the U.S. — stopped managing forests towards health about 50 years ago. There are more acres of forest in the U.S. than 100 years ago – but without forest health management and with climate change, we now have millions of acres of dense, disease-and fire-prone thickets of small trees which, combined with an encroaching urban/wildlife interface, means a year-round season of massive wildfires. The conversation has changed, as foresters globally have developed sustainable strategies for long-term forest health and as our focus on water and recreation now links directly to forest sustenance. The U.S. is starting to devote significant resource to healthy forest management. Those commitments matter more in Colorado than elsewhere; 65% of our forest land is publicly-held, compared to about 35% in the Southeast.
This requires restarting a forest products industry in the State. As recently as the ‘90s, Colorado had 11 high volume sawmills; today there are 2.
There are literally only a handful of skilled loggers still resident in Colorado. Logging today is different; here is an extraordinary steep-slope precision logging operation helping forest health on Monarch Pass to help the Arkansas River Basin in Colorado . Remarkably;
Each of the eight massive tires on the articulating Ponsse harvester and forwarder machines has a pounds-per-square-inch impact on the ground that is less than that of a mountain bike tire)
Timber Age Systems, a wonderful small operation out of Durango, is Colorado’s only mass timber manufacturing company. Supply is so constrained that mass timber building projects in Denver are paying a year ahead of delivery to buy product from Canada.
With five major development projects imminent around Denver, which already has a reputation as the mass timber capital of America, Colorado has a terrific opportunity to lead the country in sustainable timber building. The new Global Energy Park, which will leverage NREL for the world, is a $1 billion project whose renderings could be straight from the Mass Timber science building playbook:
A coalition is collaborating on a range of strategies. Perhaps Colorado can pioneer the Craft Timber industry, along the lines of the development of our collaborative, diffuse craft beer industry? Perhaps we’ll move to scale faster, partnering with some of the folks who own over a million of acres of land privately in Colorado and are rapidly implementing forest health strategies.
Wherever we land, the process to get there will be classic Colorado; inclusive, collaborative, community-connected. And, quick. Colorado is a global model for innovation ecosystems for a reason…
The sustainable, inclusive growth path isn’t just necessary and timely – it leads to stunning …
and sometimes unexpected …
destinations …
