Building with wood (additional indicator)
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The Metla House of the Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla) built in Joensuu
in 2004 is an outstanding timber construction reference building in Finland.
About 2000 m2 of wood were used to build the Metla House. This is equal,
taking into account also the carbon emission savings by construction in compare
to the similar concrete building, to a storage of 1900 tons of carbon for at least
200 years. |
The choice of building materials and production methods has
an impact on the sustainable use of natural resources, efficiency
of energy use and thereby climate change. Globally, construction
accounts for about half of all natural resources used and
for about 40% of the waste generated.
Construction regulations
In Finland, construction is governed by the Land Use and Building
Act (132/1999) and the Land Use and Building Decree
(895/1999). The Ministry of the Environment publishes the National
Building Code of Finland based on this legislation and also
coordinates regulations issued by other ministries and government
authorities concerning construction.
These regulations address issues such as construction from the
perspective of general safety and health, and energy economy.
Current legislation provides in considerable detail for the construction
stage and use of a building yet almost completely ignores
the beginning and end of the life cycle, i.e. the procurement
of building materials and the end use of construction waste. It
would be feasible to draw up uniform standards for all building
materials, covering their entire life cycle. Out of all raw materials
for industrial construction, only wood is at the moment
required to have transparent certification of origin, regardless
of the fact that wood is the only renewable building raw material
usable on an industrial scale, not to speak of the fact that it
has a much smaller carbon and water footprint than any other
industrial building material. The new standards will enhance
the status of wood.
According to current practices, building regulations must be
material-neutral; in other words, they must only specify properties
required, not specific building materials. However, it has
also been proposed that requirements for specific building materials
should be issued.
EU Member States are adopting a structural design scheme
known as Eurocode, a set of harmonised technical regulations
and dimensioning standards. Most EU Member States have not
previously had such regulations for wood structures. The adoption
of Eurocodes will make it considerably easier for instance to
export Finnish construction products to the European market. By
contrast, CE markings will become compulsory on construction
products in 2013, and this will pose a challenge particularly for
small and microenterprises in the wood product sector; there
are more than 2,000 such enterprises in Finland. A CE marking
indicates that the manufacturer has complied with the requirements
of the relevant EU Directives and that the product has
passed the required inspections.
Building design has been and will continue to be influenced
to a great extent by notable upgrades to energy efficiency requirements
and updated fire safety regulations. Adopting lowenergy
and passive construction requires considerable R&D
investments in research and in the construction industry. It is
commonly considered that fire safety regulations and their interpretation
have been a disincentive to the use of wood, favouring
concrete structures instead.
The revised fire safety regulations for Finnish building with wood
were confirmed in 2011. These significantly improve the
usability of wood as a building material, as they allow for highrise
buildings with wood frames and wood cladding up to eight
storeys high.
Promoting building with wood
In Finland, wood accounts for about 40% of all building materials.
Nearly 90% of detached houses and almost 100% of leisure
homes have a wood frame, and usually wood cladding, too. In
residential and office multi-storey buildings, however, concrete
and steel are at least as dominant as wood is in smaller houses.
Over the past 20 years, only some 500 homes have been built in
blocks of flats built with wood. The fact that multi-storey buildings
in wood are so rare has been attributed to a lack of costcompetitive
construction solutions and shortcomings in legislation
(e.g. fireproofing requirements).
Building with wood has been promoted since the 1990s through
a variety of policy programmes and action plans, such as
Wood Construction 2000, the Wood in Construction Technology
Programme 1995–1998, the Year of Wood 1996, the Time of
Wood 1997–2000, Wood Finland 1998–2005, the Programme
for Promotion of Wood Construction 2004–2010, the Strategic
Programme for the Forest Sector 2011–2015, the National Forest
Programme 2015, and funding programmes such as the Rural
Development Programme for Mainland Finland. Government
Programmes since the 1990s have systematically included goals
on promoting building with wood.
The Strategic Programme for the Forest Sector (MSO) has had a major impact on the development of the wood
product industry over the past years. It was on the strength
of this Programme that the reform of wood construction regulations,
the Puuska programme to activate SMEs in the wood
product sector and the relaunch of the WoodFinland programme
were implemented.
Partly because of these measures and partly because of a general
economic upturn, the use of wood in construction has increased,
and production has more than doubled in financial
terms over the past 20 years.
The Ministry of the Environment has studied public R&D investments
in housing, construction and land use in Finland. The key
findings were that investments were low considering the importance
of the sector; resources were decreasing rather than
increasing; and that the R&D field is fragmented, which breeds
inefficiency and explains why there have not been many internationally
competitive outcomes.
The most significant R&D actors in the wood construction sector
are Aalto University, the Universities of Helsinki, Eastern
Finland and Oulu, and the Tampere University of Technology.
The major funding provider is Tekes, which supports the
Puuska programme among others. The properties of wood, the
use of wood and wood construction are studied at the Finnish
Forest Research Institute, the Finnish Environment Institute, the
Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and VTT. The Finnish Forest
Research Institute (Metla) is currently running the PUU Research
Programme, which involves for instance a multi-faceted
study of ways to increase the use of wood and of solutions for
building with wood.
Moreover, many universities of applied sciences and organisations
in the sector contribute to the development of building
with wood through degree theses and development projects. The
most significant funding provider for research in the construction
sector in Finland is Tekes, which spends some EUR 10 million per
year in public-sector funding on construction research.
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