Timber’s Vital Role in the MMC’s Growth
Posted by Global V Tech on 4th March 2022 -
Interest in building materials from sustainable sources has been growing for some time now. Concerned consumers, investors, communities, and governments all increasingly want to be safe in the knowledge that the products they’re buying are contributing to some sort of positive social and environmental change, looking beyond price, quality and even availability in some circumstances.
This kind of sustainable procurement is commonplace with timber due to its own sustainability credits. Forests play a key role in regulating the volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by capturing and storing it in the wood, and so wooden products like timber can store significant amounts of carbon dioxide for many decades after it is used as a building material.
Wood products like timber also require a relatively lower amount of energy to extract and harvest than other resources like cement, which are extremely heavy on resources like water and electricity.
Another major advantage of using products like timber in conjunction with modern, offsite methods of construction is that it also has a short growth cycle and is entirely renewable, and so it can – in theory, if done sensibly – have the potential to yield product indefinitely. Similarly, there is no waste by-product of timber unlike other construction materials and so it is possible to use the entire resource, plus once the timber has reached the end of its lifespan as a building material, it can be burned for energy as a biomass or redistributed as chipping for composting and other agricultural and cultivation purposes.
Using timber in off-site construction can provide a building with great thermal retention too due to the fitting process allowing an extremely heat efficient and low embodied carbon solution for developments. Off-site building itself is a main choice for self-builders who tend to prioritise energy efficiency, low carbon, and low cost – all of which MMC off-site building provides.
Timber’s inclusion in a sustainable offsite housing development approach will be central to its success due to timber’s low demand in energy, cost-effectiveness, and natural carbon neutral attributes. To truly embrace these attributes, though, a true fabric-first MMC approach to timber must be made so that the climate-friendly home of the future can be holistically so, via other means such as smart technologies and renewable utilities.
Away from sustainability credits, timber and offsite MMC construction also provide housebuilders indispensable benefits like decreased risk, increased predictability and heightened speed of material delivery; all of which are essential to the main goal of increasing the number of homes from now into the future.
Timber’s properties also contribute to this high output value too; timber frame construction is not weather-dependent and so the risk of setbacks is greatly reduced and the entire process is made significantly more predictable. Much of the interior workings of a development cannot be worked on – think plastering and electrical works – until the outside is protected from the elements, and so this quick output is vital to the smooth flow of the development during all of its phases of construction, not just the initial exterior building phase, leading also to a quicker return on investment on commercial housing.
Global Vtech is a leading main contractor specialising in MMC. If you’re an SME or self-builder interested in working with modern methods of construction, get in touch here for a free consultation.
Global V Tech
GVT builds sustainable, cost-effective homes for the future, using light gauge steel, panelised building systems. We specialise in Modern Methods of Construction for small housebuilders.
