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  • 8/8/2023
A $30 million timber high rise in northern Tasmania, is garnering worldwide attention. It's just one of a handful of multi-storey designs using mostly engineered timber as pressure grows for new buildings to use less carbon-intensive materials like concrete, steel and aluminium.

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00:00 It stands out in this city block, a high-rise made almost entirely from timber.
00:07 I'm pretty proud of the whole building from a Tasmanian point of view,
00:11 and a sustainability and a specialist build.
00:14 Our floor looks magnificent, I love it.
00:16 The strength of engineered mass timber is equal to concrete and steel,
00:21 but it also absorbs the greenhouse gas carbon.
00:25 We've taken material that was destined for the wood chip pile,
00:28 that was going to China to make paper, and built it into the timber for the built environment.
00:33 Plantation eucalyptus, once destined for pulp mills,
00:37 are now being used in the engineered timber.
00:40 A mass timber beam involves placing pieces of timber on top of each other,
00:45 sometimes perpendicular.
00:47 In some of the bigger beams, it's layer upon layer upon layer,
00:51 up to 28 layers, with glue, making it as strong as steel.
00:56 Researchers at the University of Tasmania have been analysing and testing
01:01 engineered timber for decades.
01:03 They're confident the fledgling building product is here to stay.
01:08 We've got past infancy, we've got past proof of concept,
01:12 we're now getting to the thing where it is a contender.
01:15 The only red flag, the price to build, is about 30% higher than traditional products.
01:21 The speed of construction has really surprised us as well,
01:24 so we erected five levels of mass timber in three months,
01:27 whereas if that was traditional concrete and steel, it would have been at least double that.
01:31 A price the owners were willing to pay for sustainability.
01:36 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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