There are hopes Tasmania’s timber industry may find a new path to profitability, with the increasing use of prefabricated timber structures in major building projects. Source: ABC News
Associate Professor Greg Nolan from the University of Tasmania said European and US builders were using prefabricated timber in major projects already, some up to 14-storeys high.
He said using timber reduced the need for steel and concrete, which requires large amounts of energy to be transformed into useable materials.
Trees also contain atmospheric carbon, which remains stored if the trees are used as a building product. Associate Professor Nolan works with the University of Tasmania’s Centre for Sustainable Architecture with Wood (CSAW), which helped design the university’s four-storey student accommodation development being built at Inveresk near Launceston.
It is using prefabricated timber structures in each of the 120 apartments, building them at a factory about two kilometres away and then trucking them on site.
He said the builder who was making the structures had never constructed modules for a residential development before but he had done similar work on mining sites in Queensland.
“There’s no reason why other major builders can’t use the skills they already have in their carpentry teams to use other wood products and come up with solutions,” he said.
Associate Professor Nolan said the building model could help reduce costs where projects were being built in remote areas and building skills were hard to find, or the site was exposed to the elements.
“The big opportunity is when you start to move away from centre of Hobart or Launceston or centres on the north-west coast,” he said.
“To produce the job efficiently you might prefabricate large components of that in a plant in Hobart or Launceston and then truck them to these locations and put the building up in a very quick period of time.”
At the moment the timber being used is standard pine wood product available at hardware stores. But wood veneer producer Ta Ann is looking at moving into making suitable wood products at its new plant in the state’s north.
“They’re keen to develop up the skills, to make the materials that can be used in this type of modules but at the moment they’re starting up with a range they know they can sell,” he said.
