Is Finland's Wood City the future of building?

Image source, Maddy Savage

There is no scented air in the lunch room of a new upper secondary school in Helsinki.

The majority of the building is made of wood.

Many of the interior walls are lined with smooth wooden panels, which will not be finished until next year. In load bearing structures, wood has been used to support the ceilings between the floors.

Miimu Airaksinen is an engineer and vice president of development at the company that built the school.

Wood is a nice material and people like the design of wood.

There is a growing trend in the building industry. Developers are replacing concrete and steel with wood. The country is trying to become Europe's leading circular economy by achieving carbon neutrality.

Although wood is readily available in the country, it needs to be strengthened for use in taller buildings.

In Finland, where detached wooden villas and summer cottages are common, there is less public concern about fires than in other parts of the world.

There are questions about flammability in tall buildings. According to Ms Airaksinen, there is a lot of evidence that CLT performs well in fires since it can be slower to collapse compared to concrete.

At the upper school construction site, Ms Airaksinen's team are slicing up slabs of engineered wood which is produced by bonding together layers of wooden panels at right angles. She says that making the wood stiff makes it stronger.

There are a number of environmental benefits to using engineered wood like CLT. Since there is no drying phase, buildings can be completed quicker.

Wooden buildings remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they emit; they can hold in carbon that is absorbed from the atmosphere by trees for a long time. Carbon footprints are left by steel and concrete

Ali Amiri is a buildings sustainable researcher at Aalto University and a former civil engineer.

Wood has a lower greenhouse gas emissions than concrete, steel, or brick buildings. This is great news.

If 80% of new residential buildings in Europe were made of wood, they could hold up to 55 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. That is close to half the yearly emissions of the cement industry.

Since the 1990s, engineered woods have been used in Europe, but they have had a resurgence thanks to a government-backed wood-building programme. Grants can be used to help developers with tasks such as procurement and risk communication. "I think every company is doing wooden buildings right now," says Ms Airaksinen. It's on for sustainable living.

An extra layer of protection is added to the interior walls on higher floors with the use of gypsum board. Ms Airaksinen says that fire safety needs to be taken seriously. In case there will be a fire, we did a lot of simulations about how to evacuate.

There is a wooden trend in the private sector. 4% of apartments and 16% of commercial buildings are made of it.

There is a new neighbourhood in the city centre called Wood City.

It is also home to the headquarters of Supercell, where huge carved wooden characters and dramatic curved panels make for an impact reception area, and wood lines the walls of eight storeys of open plan office space, cafes and even nap rooms.

Stora Enso is a major producer of engineered wood and is collaborating with WithSecure to build a new office.

One of the most popular leisure attractions in the country is a giant wooden sauna and restaurant complex. The Lyly complex has won multiple awards for its striking wooden cloak-like structure which allows visitors to climb up its sloping roof.

Increasing the construction of wooden buildings may put too much pressure on the planet's forests.

"From a climate perspective it is a good way to store carbon, but on the other hand we are increasing the amount of consumption of natural resources," says Mai Suominen, a leading forest expert for WWF. If we plan to increase other production, we will increase the level of cutting.

In a sensitive and sustainable way, Finland's wood production companies will replant logging areas. Ms Suominen believes that there is still a risk of lower biodiversity if production increases in the future.

Climate change causes the forest processes to collapse and they are not as flexible to respond to changing environmental conditions. We will face a lot of things, including more rain, a lot of insects and a lot of dry weather.

It's important that construction firms don't just jump on the bandwagon of the wooden buildings trend in an effort to appear green.

She believes that businesses need to assess their carbon footprint and life cycle potentials of their materials.

In large-scale projects such as very tall apartment blocks, public venues or bridges, recycled concrete and steel may be more durable than wood.

She says it's not a question of which materials are right or wrong. The attitude is what matters. If you are an engineer in the construction sector, you have to consider how to use materials in a more sustainable way.

The wooden buildings sector is growing despite the environmental concerns, with other Nordic countries, Germany, Canada and the US ramping up their production in the last couple of years.

Fortune Business Insights, a market research company, valued the CLT market at $806m and predicted it would grow to $770m by the end of the decade.

A spike in inquiries from businesses and decision-makers from around the world has been noticed by the research team.

While Mr Amiri predicts wooden building construction will increase in Europe and North America in the coming years, he warns that building with engineered wood for multi-storey projects is still more expensive than using more common materials. He thinks that this could make it harder to convince countries with cheap concrete and steel to change direction.

The wooden building sector is expected to increase in tandem with the development of new low-carbon materials.

She says that they are focused on building sustainable buildings. It's the future.