Cross-laminated timber with renewable and fast growing tropical species in South East Asia

Abstract

© WCTE 2018 Committee. Cross-laminated timber has been successfully developed and applied in Europe for over decades and more recently parts of North America. In 2012, Singapore has adapted to Eurocode, which enables one of the first mass-engineered timber construction in Asian countries with its performance-based assessment. Since then, a few mass-engineered timber buildings have been constructed in Singapore, which followed by lifting its height limitation in 2016. Currently, many other mass timber projects are under planning locally however, most of projects are to be used imported Cross-Laminated Timber/Glulam from European region due to its Eurocode compliance. As the number of local mass timber projects are going to increase significantly, it will not be sustainable to transport mass-engineered timber components for the long-distance continuously, which may eventually forfeit carbon sequestration effect of timber. Southeast Asia region has one of the oldest forests in the world, which has been supplying the large amount of timber. However, its majority of use is limited to pulps and chips, and major portion of its forest has not been in sustainable status. Consequently, the regional natural reserve is still deforesting. Due to all-year round sunlight, some of plantation species in the tropical may grow about 4 times faster than the ones in temperate climate. As such, we focus on fast-growing plantation species which eventually have relatively weak mechanical property by its own but develop them in mass-engineered timber components to overcome their weakness for constructional use.