Mass Timber

Galen Nelson
Wonderful! Well, welcome, everyone, and welcome to my guests, Peggy Clouston and Alex Schreyer, both from UMass Amherst, and everyone joining today at MassCEC and beyond to Thoughtful Climate, our speaker series. Here, each month, we highlight experts, pioneers, and practitioners from a variety of existing and emerging climate tech sectors and disciplines, as well as subject matter experts who can provide insights into broader economic, social, and technological dynamics shaping the climate tech industry. Today, we are talking about mass timber, its promise as a low-carbon building material, its potential as a rural economic driver, and a promising solution to the region\'s affordable housing challenge. We will also discuss some of the market traction challenges facing mass timber and steps that must be taken to ensure that mass timber products contribute rather than detract from our climate objectives. Before I jump to Peggy and Alex, I am going to provide a bit of context for our conversation today.

Galen Nelson
In our industry and discussions about reducing carbon in the built environment, we tend to focus a lot of our attention on so-called operational carbon, the emissions associated with energy consumed either at generating facilities to power our grid or on-site in buildings in boilers, hot water heaters, or stoves. Less attention is paid to embodied carbon, the emissions associated with the resource extraction, manufacturing, delivery, and installation of building materials. As our buildings become more and more efficient, thanks to more stringent building codes, the share of embodied carbon relative to operational carbon is increasing. That is why more attention is being paid to the embodied carbon in building materials, particularly those that are energy intensive to produce, like steel and concrete.

Galen Nelson
Of course, we build low- to mid-rise residential and commercial buildings in this country with conventional wood products, so-called stick-built construction with dimensional lumber like 2x4s and 2x6s and sheet goods like plywood. So, what is mass timber, and why might it be a superior alternative to both conventional wood products and other framing materials? This is a huge topic, a sprawling topic, and I know that we will not have time to touch every angle today with Peggy and Alex, but we will do our best. Let us dive in. A bit of housekeeping before we start. As usual, for those of you who are listening in, feel free to drop questions in the Q&A. We will reserve some time at the end of our conversation and do our best to address those. Peggy and Alex, I really appreciate you joining me today, and Happy Halloween!

Peggi Clouston
Same to you!

Galen Nelson
Yeah, thank you. None of us are in costume, but that is okay.

Galen Nelson
Please take a moment to both introduce yourselves. Peggy, why don\'t we start with you? I remember hearing about your research several years ago. I know you are exploring, in part, the potential for regional tree species, including hemlock, to provide feedstock for mass timber products, and I was really intrigued and excited by that. I would just love to hear more about your background.

Peggi Clouston
Hi everybody, and happy Halloween to everyone listening. I am a professor of wood mechanics and timber engineering at UMass. I actually started out as a structural engineer in Vancouver back in the early 90s. I was designing timber structures in Vancouver and the environment around there. I did all three of my degrees at UBC. Then in 2001, I was asked to join UMass and mostly do research on wood, but it branched, pardon the pun, into other directions like bamboo, grass, straw bale, and a lot of different renewable materials of that sort. Maybe I can hand it over to Alex at this point, and then we will kind of clue it up.

Galen Nelson
Great.

Alex Schreyer
Sure, no problem. Hey, everybody, happy Friday. I am a senior lecturer at UMass Amherst. I have been here for a while and have been teaching courses in materials and digital design. My background is also engineering, structural engineering. I have done wood research in my background. Currently, I am a little bit more on the administrative side. I am also the department head of the Environmental Conservation Department at UMass Amherst, which is very relevant to our topic because within our department, we have forestry, and we do have mass timber building products and other things, too. We do have fisheries, wildlife, and all of these other topics. As it turns out, for us, we have a lot of impact and provide ecosystems for those. Anyway, that is a little bit of my background right now.

Galen Nelson
Great, thanks, Alex. Let us level set. Peggy, could you please just briefly define mass timber, so we all know what we are talking about here?

Peggi Clouston
Well if you would not mind, I just wanted to back up a wee bit because Alex and I have been working on projects together for a long time. A couple of points of pride that I would like to set out there in the early stages is that Alex and I were the faculty intervention into making the OEB Design Building, which is the state-of-the-art mass timber structure. We were the reason that it became mass timber. I reached out to, or was lucky enough to get the ear of, former Congressman John Olver. He saw the environmental benefits and also wanted to help reinvigorate the local forestry. It is all very relevant to our conversation today around local species, and he made it so. Without him, it would not have happened. The other point of pride is that Alex and I have a new book coming out on mass timber with Wiley Publishing, and folks can pre-order it on a website, I think, that Galen was going to provide at some point.

Galen Nelson
Beautiful.

Peggi Clouston
Back to what mass timber is exactly, your question. It refers to a group of engineered wood products that are large enough to be considered heavy timber by the building code. Products like glulam, cross-laminated timber, dowel-laminated timber, structural composite lumber, some of these terms you may or may not know. They are basically made from gluing together smaller parts of wood, usually 2x4s or smaller, and making them into much larger pieces that are then used to frame floors and walls and beams and columns and that kind of thing. Their sizes are so big that they are used typically in large-scale construction alongside steel and concrete, so they are not necessarily intended for single-family housing applications.

Galen Nelson
Great, wonderful. Thank you for dropping the link into the OEB Design Building. It really is beautiful.

Alex Schreyer
If you are from the state or from the region, I strongly recommend a visit. It is wonderful to see this building on the UMass Amherst campus. I took the liberty to change my background, so that is the old building during construction.

Galen Nelson
Great.

Peggi Clouston
Dare I do this, I am actually in my office with some beautiful connection details there. When my students from Timber Engineering Design come up to talk with me, I just point at the building as the example, as the educator. In the process, this is how connections are made in these state-of-the-art buildings. It is great.

Galen Nelson
That is wonderful.

Galen Nelson
Let us pivot to the benefits. Maybe you can both kind of tag-team this one. What are some of the core benefits of mass timber? Peggy, do you want to lead off?

Peggi Clouston
I would say, primarily, the reason eyes have been put on mass timber is because of the environmental benefits that you pointed out at the very beginning, Galen. What is commonly recognized is that wood has a low embodied carbon compared to steel and concrete. As you said, turning trees into wood products emits a relatively small amount of carbon dioxide, especially if you compare that to concrete. You may have heard this phrase out there. I think CBS News published it once. If the cement industry were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the world, after the U.S. and China. In terms of how we build better and have a smaller environmental footprint, it makes a lot of sense that wood is one of the materials that we should be looking at. But I think it goes beyond that.

Peggi Clouston
Life cycle assessment studies have shown it to have, many studies; this is not just one-off, but many of them now have shown it to have a smaller environmental footprint across all the categories. Lower eutrophication, which is pollution to our lakes, and lower global warming potential, which has other pollutants besides carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, all kinds of nasty chemicals, are reduced by turning trees into wood products. Besides putting less carbon in the atmosphere when it is produced, it also has a way of taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in our buildings for hundreds of years. It is a substantial amount, too. These wood products are 50% carbon by dry weight. You could even make the argument, and I think I do in the book, that using mass timber in large structures on a global scale could be considered like creating a new carbon sink, like the forests themselves or the oceans, that are able to draw down carbon and hold onto it to offset our climate crises.

Peggi Clouston
I think that is all I had to say about the environment. Another point, I think, is a main benefit of using mass timber, of course, is the aesthetics and the biophilia. Really not my area of expertise. There are scientists now who are specifically looking into the biological and psychological effects of being surrounded by wood. But I can tell you from personal experience that these large rooms that have surfaces of wood strike you at an innate, beyond emotional, beyond the comfort level. It is mood lifting, and people in the building are happy to be here. We have lots of students who, I have just heard recently, you know, showing around their parents, this is not a building I have classes in, but I just like to study here. It genuinely is a connection.

Galen Nelson
The studies are quite compelling, actually. Studies about the health benefits are quite compelling. I think there is something else with regard to the fact that some of the mass timber products serve, in many cases, as the finished material. You are also eliminating the need for drywall and other finished materials that may themselves have high embodied carbon. You are able to use a structural material as a finished material, so it is also just a more elegant way of.

Peggi Clouston
Excellent point. Because they are considered heavy timber, they do not require the additional fire protective coating like what steel would require, or light frame construction would require. Great point.

Galen Nelson
You can have the structure as the finished material and avoid all that other embodied energy from gypsum board or the nasty spray that they spray in concrete garages or steel that has to be applied to steel so that it does not melt during a high temperature situation.

Alex Schreyer
From the construction perspective, I can jump in just a second. There are a lot of practical benefits. One is, of course, it is easier to attach anything to it. You can screw into that, you can drill holes easier after the fact, although most penetrations and holes and connections are pre-drilled in construction. So, there is that. One thing that we noticed on the construction side was that it is quieter, and everybody seems to be happier. It is not as loud and inhospitable.

Alex Schreyer
Maybe another benefit to mention there is that mass timber is typically, purpose always, pre-manufactured. Any kind of mass timber element gets manufactured off-site, not just produced, but also cut to length, drilled, all of the holes; everything is pre-cut. Typically, there is no on-site cutting for mass timber building elements. They just come in, and the crane just pops them into place. That way, also, you can increase construction speed because now the fabrication can run in parallel. You do not have to have concrete that needs to harden on the construction site and wait for it. So, there is that benefit. Aesthetics, I think you mentioned, is absolutely a big one. Usually, the first thing that architects gravitate to, of course.

Galen Nelson
That is very helpful, Alex.

Galen Nelson
I think we will get into this a bit later, but it is also worth noting, and please correct me if this is inaccurate, that a good deal of the mass timber products right now that we are seeing installed and being used for construction projects, a relatively small but growing number of construction projects in New England, are coming from Quebec. Is that accurate?

Peggi Clouston
Yes, northern Quebec is where Nordic Structures has their facility. A lot of the wood basket is directly, you know; seven hours drive north of the border. It is just one of the mass timber facilities. Some of the other structures around here have taken them from the Pacific Northwest mills or even Europe. In Germany, there is KLH, who is a strong competitor. The mass timber comes from a lot of different places right now.

Galen Nelson
I wanted to just get into two other benefits. Thank you, that was very helpful. One that I think is somewhat interesting and not intuitive is the fire resistance. I was very interested to learn about that. I suppose if you begin to think about it for more than a few minutes, perhaps it is intuitive because you do not start a campfire with logs, you start it with kindling. In some ways, it makes sense that these large timber products would take a long time for them to catch fire, and because of their thickness, it will take a long time for fire to begin to impact their structural integrity. Whereas steel structures can fail, in some cases, more rapidly. I think that is accurate, but please correct me or chime in if that is not. I always thought that was one of the more interesting benefits of mass timber construction.

Peggi Clouston
You are absolutely right. I will expand on it a little bit more. I have this great graph that I show my students in the timber engineering class about how high temperatures, ones that are experienced during a fire, affect both wood and steel. Mass timber, as you say, has the ability to char. That layer around the outside of a large section of wood actually provides an insulative layer and protects the strength of the core of the wood. The mass of sections are able to hold load for easily two hours before any kind of structural concern happens. Whereas when steel is exposed to high temperatures, I am not going to remember the exact timing, but I think it is within 20 minutes, the capability of the steel to hold the high load drops, the steel melts, and it ultimately gives way. It cannot hold the load any further. Safety-wise, the mass timber is a far better situation. Nobody wants to deal with a fire after the fact, so of course it is going to be a mess, whether it is steel or concrete or whatever it is, but the safety component, which is what building codes really pay close attention to, mass timber does not need to be additionally protected for that reason.

Peggi Clouston
Actually, one other thing. There is a great image that came out of British Columbia. It was a fire aftermath of a fire where the first floor was framed with parallel strand lumber, which is a mass timber-type product, and the second floor was framed with steel. After the fire, the steel beams from the second floor fell on top of the wood beam from below and melted over like a wet noodle. It was really a visual understanding of how the two materials behave in high heat.

Galen Nelson
That is powerful. Thanks for that, Peggy. That is helpful to understand. Let us actually talk about some of the environmental and ecosystem impacts. I think one of the brilliant moves that this state made years ago was to combine energy and environmental affairs under one cabinet. We do need to keep our focus squarely on both objectives, advancing our clean energy agenda and moving toward our climate objectives while also protecting our forests and our ecosystems. I want to make sure that we cover this in depth. Of course, there is no perfect building material. We talked about concrete earlier. We are blessed with having some wonderful and creative innovators in this state that are working on low-embodied carbon concrete, which is great. There is no doubt that low-embodied concrete is superior to the business-as-usual approach. For mass timber, it just seems like we need, perhaps, among other things, manufacturers to optimize timber harvesting approaches to ensure the lowest possible ecosystem impacts. That means thinking about the impacts on our forests, the impacts of using heavy equipment during logging, which can harm the carbon sequestration capacity of our forest soils. How do we get this right? We are already depending on our forests here in the state and around the region, and indeed around the globe, to sequester substantial amounts of carbon if we are to meet our climate objectives. Now, unfortunately, there is some new science, new research that shows pretty clearly that the ability of our forests to sequester carbon may be negatively impacted by climate change because of rising temperatures. We have all these pressures on our forests. I would love you both to just jump in here and talk a bit about timber harvesting best practices. If we are to grow this industry in our region, how should we do it? How can we do it responsibly? Should we establish EPDs, or Environmental Product Declarations, for mass timber products? What should the reference life cycle analyses include? I would love to have you both address some of those core questions around environmental and ecosystem impacts of mass timber. Perhaps, Peggy, you can start?

Peggi Clouston
Okay. I have to start by saying.

Galen Nelson
And sorry, that was a lot.

Peggi Clouston
No, it is totally, you are absolutely right. If we are starting something, we need to give it full thought all the way through that it would be a smart thing to do. I do not know a lot about timber harvesting practices because that is not something I study, but I do know that North American protocols from organizations like the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification and the Forest Stewardship Council and SFI, Society for Forest, you know, all.

Alex Schreyer
Sustainable Forestry Initiative.

Peggi Clouston
There it is, Sustainable Forestry Initiative. Those darn acronyms, you know, SFI, FSC, they just rattle off the tongue. To actually go back, no, they follow really strict protocols that balance ecological, social, and economic factors. When lumber is certified by any of these organizations, they make sure that it is guaranteed sustainable, traceable, and ethical. They are really strong eyes on this.

Galen Nelson
There is a chain of custody.

Peggi Clouston
The chain of custody is also very much part of it. Any mass timber manufacturer in North America will have already; they are very strong about prominently featuring their certified lumber in their literature. They have green verification reports that are certified by American Plywood Association, APA, and they have EPDs already conveying the LCA data of their products. That is really a point of pride for them, that all of the wood that they use in the mass timber products comes from certified forests.

Peggi Clouston
I cannot honestly say that we are growing more lumber right now than is being harvested. I do believe that is true, but the difference might have to do with the forest fires that we have been suffering. There is an amazing website called Global Forest Watch. Anybody can go to that site and interactively see how forest cover has changed over the past 20 years. That we have control over making sure that forests stay as forests in North America because of these great protocols that are in place, looking after wildlife and ecological diversity and all of the main issues that people have. Because of the stress from drought and infestation, our trees are susceptible to forest fires. We have seen it in Canada, and there are large swaths of forest devastated, which unfortunately is making climate change even worse because it is putting more CO2 back into the atmosphere. I would even more strongly say we need commercial incentives, like mass timber, to do more forest management along the lines of best practices, just as you are saying, so that we can even more prevent these forest fires from happening, if possible.

Galen Nelson
That is very helpful.

Peggi Clouston
It costs money to get foresters to work out riparian zones and all of those best practices, which I do not know enough about. We definitely need to do more about that, and we need to pay for it. The way to pay for it is to have economic incentives, like cross-laminated timber, for example.

Alex Schreyer
Maybe if I could just quickly jump in. For anybody who is interested in this particular topic and healthy forests, it is actually great to talk to a forester, a person who knows this in and out. We just recently were on another forest walk with the New England Forestry Foundation, a great organization from the region here, of course. It is amazing to hear how mindful they are about forest management. This is, of course, done differently in different parts of the country because of different species, different climate zones, etc., and then, of course, very differently all over the world, like Peggy already alluded to. It is very interesting to hear the thought processes that go into forest management. Where what may look like a clear cut to the untrained eye, what may look like brush left on the ground to the untrained eye may actually be a habitat, may actually be helping future forest growth. Different forests have very different ways to regenerate. Our forests here have very different ways to regenerate than the Pacific Northwest, for example. There need to be different strategies. Like Peggy said, I think the most important thing here is really the economic incentive, because ultimately, any mass timber producer will want to keep producing mass timber. That is the economic incentive. They will not deforest, because it goes completely against what their interest is.

Galen Nelson
They need that feedstock.

Alex Schreyer
Exactly. The tricky thing right now, especially with climate change, is that forests are a long-term investment, so to speak, if you want to think of it that way. The trees take, whatever, 80 years to be up to harvestable sizes, putting it that way. It is an interesting time right now where they have to start thinking about what will live well in 80 years.

Galen Nelson
I see some parallels to the energy challenges we face as a region. It is worth calling out that we are not necessarily talking about new, massive efforts to either encourage or harvest species in Massachusetts, necessarily, for mass timber production. Perhaps there is a regional approach where harvesting is happening in Maine or states that just have far larger resources, and maybe the manufacturing is happening in Maine as well, or in other New England states, or perhaps in Massachusetts. In the same way that we are looking to the waters off the shore of Massachusetts as an amazing offshore wind resource, and the way that we look to inland Maine as an incredible land-based wind resource. There is a regional approach here that makes sense. We are not necessarily talking about having all the components of this industry concentrated in one state or another.

Peggi Clouston
I would agree with that. There are not only forest differences, but there are cultural differences. On the West Coast, the forestry aspect is huge. It is already very much alive and giving people jobs. Whereas here, a lot of the mills have closed down, and what we used to have as a vibrant furniture industry is no longer. It would be nice to get back to that proud use of our forests in covered bridges, those heritage bridges that you now see. From the wanting to get into our forests and actually use some of these species that are lesser-known species for structural purposes, there is not that drive like it would be on the West Coast. There are cultural differences, ultimately, so those things have to be considered, absolutely.

Galen Nelson
This may be a good pivot to the economic development piece. I know that you were just getting at this, Peggy, that mills once dotted the landscape across this state and all of New England, and far fewer remain. The Healey administration has a very strong interest in supporting rural economic development, and Energy and Environmental Affairs is very interested in the forest economy. Do you see, and we were kind of getting into this a little bit, does mass timber represent an opportunity for rural economic development in Massachusetts and beyond, and what does that look like?

Peggi Clouston
That is a big question, and unfortunately a kind of long-winded answer, if you kind of indulge me for a minute. I would say yes, but on the surface, there are many reasons why we would want to have a plant here in the Northeast region. I will just maybe list the reasons why it makes total sense, and then maybe tell you why it is not happening, at least from my own perspective.

Peggi Clouston
The Northeast is a construction hotspot, with cities like Boston and New York right next door. It would put mass timber closer to those markets. Of course, that would reduce transportation costs and emissions. I think there is a really strong desire for architects to be able to say, we buy local. Our trees come from our own backyards, or not backyards, but our own wood baskets. Right now, as we mentioned earlier, the mass timber comes from the Pacific Northwest, the Southeast, Canada, even Europe. It would be great.

Peggi Clouston
Boston and New York have that construction boom happening. The Northeast has some severely economically depressed regions, in northern Maine and even in western Massachusetts, all Vermont and New Hampshire. That would very much benefit from jobs that would come with a mass timber industry. All the way upstream and downstream of the supply chain, foresters, tree planters, truck drivers, mill workers, mill managers, delivery folks, logistics folks. A lot of jobs. Some of them are skilled, some of them are not so skilled. It really presents this wonderful opportunity to try and reinvigorate that forest economy again, like it used to be in the 50s for furniture. This mass timber industry is really high-tech, manufacturing-wise. It uses robotics and highly mechanized equipment. Right now, mass timber manufacturers in North America buy the equipment from Germany, France, Switzerland. Really high-tech stuff comes from Europe. I would even say that, you know, Mass robotics hub; we have the expertise here to really jump on that bandwagon and be part of that high-tech wood processing industry. It presents these exciting opportunities.

Galen Nelson
I hear echoes of similar challenges with regard to offshore wind. We actually have a lot of the skills and the abilities to manufacture, to build up an offshore wind supply chain, and we are beginning to take those steps, and MassCEC supports some of that work. A lot of that product is coming from Europe right now. It is an enormous opportunity for us to build more of that here.

Peggi Clouston
Absolutely, right. The other point about why we would, at least on the surface, want to have a plant is that the East Coast is one of the most heavily forested regions in the U.S. That comes with the caveat that we have a very heavily mixed species forest region, and a lot of them are hardwoods, which are not necessarily ideal for structural purposes. They are not being used in mass timber. It is why we have such beautiful colors in the fall, the birch and maples. They do not, unfortunately, make great wood for mass timber. Most of the structural lumber that we produce here, I think you alluded to this earlier, Galen, comes from northern Maine. That is spruce, pine, and fir. There are mills, operational mills up there who are producing it and using it for stick frame. In fact, just recently, for cross-laminated timber by Sterling Structural, who also adopted eastern hemlock. One thing I did not mention at the outset of this, but you did allude to it, that my research had looked into the structural viability of using eastern hemlock in cross-laminated timber, and proved that it is definitely a viable material, and it competes really well with the established grades of CLT. Sterling Structural, fast forward to today, now has an actual product line using eastern hemlock. That lumber, actually coming from the New England region, is part of their portfolio. Architects can phone them up and say, yes, I want eastern hemlock for my project in Somerville, which has happened already. It is kind of cool.

Peggi Clouston
On the surface, it sounds like it would make a lot of sense. In fact, some manufacturers have expressed interest in putting a plant here. SmartLam, a bunch of years back, their headquarters is in Montana, and they have a plant in Alabama, I think it is. They announced a few years ago that they were going to put up a facility in northern Maine, close to some of those larger mills there, but they never did. Why not? Well, maybe conjecture on my side, but I think a lot of it has to do with lumber mill competitiveness. The ones that are here now do not have the high-tech equipment that the mills in the West and Canada have. They are not set up for mass timber production to produce CLT or glulam. They need to have laser scanners and 3D imaging systems and fast stress graders so that you can quickly figure out the grade of the wood, robotics to optimize the cuts and move material around quickly, and sophisticated kilns because some of our species, like eastern hemlock, would benefit from a vacuum kiln as opposed to just the old regular drying kiln, which takes much more time. That is a big disadvantage but maybe it could be overcome with enough investment.

Galen Nelson
And that investment will only happen if there is demand.

Peggi Clouston
Right, you got it. If you have policy frameworks to further encourage, and we will get into this a little bit, the state is doing quite a bit to promote responsible mass timber. These facilities are not going to make investments unless they see the demand. Maybe later I can talk a little bit more about some of the initiatives that are happening to try and increase demand but focus specifically on production.

Peggi Clouston
A lot of our forests around here are privately run, family forests. They represent smaller parcelized, like 80 acres of land. They are owned by families, each with different opinions about what to do with their trees. Like Alex was mentioning, New England Forestry Foundation, together with our own UMass Family Forest Research Center, they do an amazing job reaching out to these families to help them decide whether to harvest, or conserve, or sell, or pass on the land to their heirs. Because there are so many little swatches of land, it really complicates the lumber supply chain and increases administrative costs, I would imagine, permits and contracts and road access to get in there is complicated. It just makes it a lot more difficult than what is happening on the West Coast when there are much larger areas that are being harvested by big companies. The supply chain efficiencies are just not there yet not like in the Pacific Northwest or Southeast.

Galen Nelson
And that would just come with larger markets, and you would get economies of scale, consolidation, and so on. We are kind of in the easy-to-recognize, early and somewhat painful stages of market transformation. That is simply where we are.

Galen Nelson
I would like to just briefly recognize that there are some wonderful leaders in this space. Heather Henriksen and her team at Harvard are the forces behind the Treehouse project at Harvard, which is exciting. John Dalzell at the City of Boston has been pushing mass timber for a while now, and the city has demonstrated great leadership with regard to mass timber. At Leggat McCall, I think, just got a lot of attention for their mass timber, a pretty significant multi-family affordable housing project in Charlestown, a beautiful structure. There are so many others. Our very own, my wonderful colleague, Bev Craig, just launched our Mass Timber Accelerator here at MassCEC. I believe that was just launched yesterday, actually.

Peggi Clouston
Awesome.

Galen Nelson
At the state, Energy and Environmental Affairs is very supportive and working very closely with DCAM, the Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. For those of you who do not play bureaucratic acronyms for \$500, that is the state body that is responsible for public construction projects. They have done a few mass timber projects as well. There is this wonderful mix of public, private, and academic sector market actors who are effective early adopters, market leaders, creating some of that market pull. We are still, as we noted, kind of in the very early stages, really just with these early adopters, and have not yet reached a point where there is significant market traction, which is what we will need, again, in order for facility owners to justify making investments and so on.

Alex Schreyer
Let me quickly expand, if I can, on the academic and give a shout-out to our academic administration at UMass and a bunch of other universities. A lot of universities are building dorms, academic buildings now in mass timber. There is a bunch of showcase projects out there. At UMass, we have seen that our Olver Design Building was only the start. There is currently a hybrid mass timber building going up, the Sustainable Engineering Library. The Computer Science Building got expanded with a mass timber wing. It is very exciting to see how these projects can then spawn other projects. People get excited, and they want the mass timber building then. The other benefit, too, that we are seeing is we used to have to, in our classes, drag out slides from other places. Now all we need to do is point up. The teaching part is so much more visual, it is much more immediate. If engineering, architecture, construction students can see all of this and hear from experts, of course, but also study in these spaces, it is really beneficial for the overall.

Galen Nelson
Thank you for sharing your beautiful background shots, Alex. We were discussing before we all jumped on how this is such a visual topic, and mass timber is so warm and so beautiful. It is really nice to see some images. Thanks for sharing those.

Galen Nelson
I do want to talk a little bit about mass timber and housing. I am sure you are both aware, and many folks tuning in today are aware, that we are in the midst of a significant state and regional housing challenge. Mass timber has been identified in multiple studies as a really good solution for this kind of middle market, six- to twelve-story mid-rise apartment buildings. My superficial understanding is that it is often too expensive to use steel or concrete in this segment, but those heights prohibit stick-built conventional construction. Alex, first of all, is that accurate? Could mass timber be part of the solution in this segment, this kind of mid-rise, multifamily housing segment?

Alex Schreyer
It is really good that you are switching over to the demand side, like you were saying earlier, too, because there needs to be that demand. Actually, just stepping back from your question for one quick second. One thing that happened is that the code changes are recent that allowed mass timber to be built. Again, a few three-letter acronyms, but there is the International Building Code, the IBC, which underlies any state building code. Massachusetts was on the 2015, I think, IBC for a while and just recently changed it to the more current version of that that includes possibilities for mass timber in a very new and much more exciting way than we used to do. This came up when we were building the Olver Design Building because at that point, some parts that we wanted to build were not part of the building code. Everything is possible if you prove it, but you have to go through this process of proving viability on a single project, and the costs that are associated with that. That is often too much of a hindrance for project developers to take on new technology like this. Having that now in the building code makes a lot of things possible immediately, because it is immediately allowed. There is no process to go through.

Alex Schreyer
Pivoting back to your question, of course, especially when we talk about housing, very often multifamily housing ended up being stick-built, that can only be built up to, I think, five stories or something like this. The typical solution there is to put a story of steel or concrete below that, so that you get a commercial story.

Galen Nelson
A pedestal with stick built above it.

Alex Schreyer
Exactly. Classic construction all over Boston, everywhere, hotels, multifamily, that is where that is. That fills that side very cost-efficiently. Anything taller than that, and you alluded to this already, classically would be built in steel in our neck of the woods, so to speak. Concrete in other places, West Coast is more concrete, we are more steel here. It is not as cost-efficient. That is really where mass timber can come in, and where these new categories can come in. Just to indulge me a little bit, a really quick overview. The new building code allows now three more categories. They are called Type IV-A, B, and C. We can build quite high in those categories. We can do several more stories now beyond this kind of six-story limit. That middle portion of the market is now permissible right through the code. Anything taller than that, that is where it gets a little tricky on the mass timber side. There are buildings, like the Ascent Tower, for example, which have a number of concrete stories, and then, of course, a number of mass timber stories on top of that that allow for fairly high construction. Typically at that point, you are more in the steel range, for us. Like you said, this middle segment can very much be covered by mass timber. There are other benefits, too, even for lower-rise buildings. Floors, for example, can be fairly efficiently done in mass timber, because a lot of walls in these multifamily projects are pre-manufactured, off-site manufactured, they get brought to the site and then lifted in place. If we can do that with the floor, too, everything is a little faster. That works. Shear walls, elevator walls, basically elevator shaft walls, stairwells, that can be done with these new products, like cross-laminated timber. Even on the lower height side of things. There are quite a few possibilities now that developers have. Even if they do not do the whole thing out of mass timber, maybe they will use a hybrid approach with light frame or with structural steel. There is a bunch of new possibilities.

Peggi Clouston
Do you mind if I jump in and add one more here? It actually has a lot to do with our own regional supply of species. Some of them are non-obvious, they have lower specific gravity or density, and they do not make as strong a structural product as the Douglas fir cross-laminated timber or glulam. If we are specifically talking about housing, and this is an argument I have made to politicians and so on, we are not looking at long spans or high loads. We could potentially use CLT or glulam from lower quality species, and it really lends itself well to commoditizing mass timber more. Sterling Structural, I mentioned earlier, they have CLT up to 17-foot spans. They do not do everything like most of the mass timber manufacturers do the 60-foot-long CLT that can span multiple supports and can be used in a shear core elevator shaft, that kind of thing. They do not. Multi-story family housing can support short spans, lower quality, and be built beautifully by code. I think there is a great argument here to try to get mass timber more into those kinds of applications.

Galen Nelson
Great, thank you both. That is really helpful. I am just looking at the time, and I want to use our remaining minutes as strategically as possible. I want to get to some questions. If you could just, perhaps, very quickly hit on, a minute or less, I try to address the federal administration, which has been very challenging across a broad swath of climate tech products. I think it is kind of interesting to think about the tariffs on Canadian products as perhaps an opportunity to slightly improve the economic condition or environment for U.S.-produced mass timber. Is that a fair assumption? Because those raw goods from Canada, the stick-built 2x4, 2x6 products, are going to be more expensive now. Does that improve the project economics for mass timber manufactured in this country?

Peggi Clouston
I will start, if that is okay, Alex. In terms of raw material for mass timber, the 2x4 lumber, the manufacturers take it from their own regional wood basket. Even companies like Mercer Mass Timber, who have facilities in Kelowna or Penticton, BC, and another one somewhere down south, Montana, maybe. They had completely different species in those two different facilities because they draw from what is around the mill. They do not actually import lumber to make mass timber from Canada, unless they have a facility in Canada. I do not think that very high tariff, is it like 45% now, or something outrageous, is going to have an impact on the manufacturer. Nobody knows.

Alex Schreyer
No, nobody knows.

Peggi Clouston
In terms of engineered wood products, if a project was being built in Boston, and they had to look at Nordic from northern Canada versus Mercer from Montana, or SmartLam from Alabama, then there may be a slight advantage to American-made products from that perspective. That is possible.

Alex Schreyer
I was just going to say, another aspect is there are also tariffs on steel. There might be some opportunity costs happening here, opportunities coming our way.

Galen Nelson
Sure.

Galen Nelson
I do want to make sure that, again, we have got some questions. I wanted to give you both an opportunity to talk about some of the steps that the state has taken. We are very happy to have just launched our Mass Timber Accelerator here at MassCEC. What are some other things that the state could do to help improve market conditions, increase market traction for mass timber products? What are your top five quick hits on the next steps that we could be digging into? That could be programs, it could be policy, any of the above. Love to hear from you on that.

Peggi Clouston
I am going to jump in with a self-serving wish. Research. We really need money to conduct research. Steel and concrete have been the status quo for so long. We have got nothing left to research, but steel and, I am kidding, of course. There is so much opportunity to go in new directions with mass timber. Species is just one thing. With new types of technologies, I did not really say my other research areas, but we are now looking at mass timber T-beams, different configurations to be more efficient with the use of the wood. Robotics for mass timber production, life cycle assessment. All of these things, we need more people and more research happening in laboratories. Of course, go ahead, Alex.

Alex Schreyer
I was just going to add, education as well. We are trying to do our part, teaching our own students. There has always been a bit of a lack of education in engineering schools. Constructors often did not know how to estimate this material or how to build it. All of that is very much needed. I encourage all schools to have a mass timber class.

Peggi Clouston
Absolutely. There are very few engineering schools with mass timber design at a high enough level being taught in the U.S. I think around 50% offer anything in timber design. That is a major component of getting people comfortable and more familiar with the material when it is laid out on the job table, which options we are going to go with. It works against wood to not have an expert in the room. Definitely.

Galen Nelson
The market pull cannot come from developers and building owners and facility owners alone. We need the design and engineering community to come along for the ride and embrace the approaches. There is software out there. I think that there are some companies working on this in Massachusetts, which is very exciting.

Peggi Clouston
That is a great point.

Alex Schreyer
Maybe one more aspect, and that might answer one of the questions that I am seeing here, is also, very often. If wood is not even considered, then it cannot even compete. There are places that are going with a wood-first sort of approach, where any project, or any publicly funded project, at least considers wood. Once people do that, it is interesting that the structural cost for a whole project is not that big overall. The mechanical systems cost far more on a building project. It may be a little up, a little down. There might be opportunities if wood is considered early in the design process. You can make it very much cost competitive; you may be able to make it cheaper, you most probably are going to be able to speed up your construction schedule overall and have cost savings that way. There are quite a few of those things that can be considered, again, if people at least consider it.

Galen Nelson
I know we are pretty much at time here, but there are some wonderful questions in the Q&A. I think what I would like to try and do is perhaps work with you in post some answers on our Thoughtful Climate website, which we will have up soon, a page on our website. I just have to share that John Dalzell is hoping we can share the image of the steel beam draped over the mass timber beam, which is kind of a scary picture appropriate for Halloween, I think.

Peggi Clouston
Make sure you get that.

Galen Nelson
Some good questions about the credibility of some of the various sustainable forestry associations. I think that is a very good question that I certainly remember from my earliest days in the green building world. Something that I failed to pose to you, Peggy, about the woolly adelgid and hemlock. Can this help? Perhaps, if hemlock becomes more commercially valuable, there might be greater efforts to combat woolly adelgid, which is, depending on where you are in the region, decimating that species, which is a very important species about ecosystem health.

Peggi Clouston
Definitely. We have entomologists in our department, actually, who are looking at other insects that eat the woolly adelgid and ways to try and avoid it. Yes, absolutely, we need more people on that to try and save the good species that we have.

Galen Nelson
And it costs money.

Peggi Clouston
Costs money, yep.

Galen Nelson
We will leave you all with that. I want to thank you both. This has been a really wonderful conversation. Thanks to everyone who joined today. I just dropped, if you are interested in tuning into these series in the future, the link to subscribe to Thoughtful Climate in the chat. Next month, we will be talking about balcony solar and other DIY clean energy approaches. That is the next topic we will be covering. I want to thank you both for joining me. This has been a great conversation. Thanks to everyone who joined remotely and look forward to the next conversation.

Alex Schreyer
Thanks for having us.

Peggi Clouston
Thanks. Thank you so much. Take care.

Galen Nelson
Take care, all.

Peggi Clouston
Bye.