Mass timber has a Scope 3 emissions problem. Apart from the fact that harvesting fresh timber is not carbon neutral, and the so-called “carbon debt” we incur from each big harvest will take generations to pay off, many U.S.-based developers operating in the mass timber game simply haven’t figured out how to make their projects truly local. This is due, in large part, because the U.S. was late to the party.

Not too long ago, plentiful forests didn’t translate into suitable sources for mass timber products. That tide is shifting, at least for some regions. Within the last decade, the number of mass timber production plants in North America has grown exponentially, from 4 to nearly 40, with the heaviest growth concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, and the Southeast coming in a distant second.

Amidst that growth, many of the more high-profile developments, including the Ascent in Milwaukee and Bowdoin College’s Barry Mills Hall and the Gibbons Center for Arctic Studies, in Brunswick, Maine, were built using Austrian spruce, resulting in comparatively higher upfront emissions associated with transportation.

“We did incorporate that into our [life cycle analysis] to understand the carbon impact of bringing the timber from Europe,” Lauren Piepho, a structural engineer with HGA, the design firm behind the two Bowdoin buildings, recently told ThinkWood. To Piepho’s point, for a region especially rich in pine, spruce, and other softwood species, the Northeast currently has no mass timber manufacturing capacity.

A home-grown building

“The plants in Europe have been operating for 20 to 30 years. They have tons of experience, they know what they’re doing, they’re super-efficient. So, everybody goes there because of that reliability,” says Cathy Pfeiffenberger, head of development and construction at Jamestown.

Upending that trend, Pfeiffenberger’s development company recently cut the ribbon on 619 Ponce, an Atlanta office building constructed from CLT panels and glulam beams, nearly 1750 cubic meters in total (or 741,184 board feet), and all of it sourced from Georgia-grown southern yellow pine. This project represents the first mass timber development in the state using regional supply chains for its principal building material.

By the numbers, the four-story 619 Ponce, designed by Handel Architects and located in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, comprises 115,00 square feet of combined office space and retail, plus on-site daycare, outdoor space, medical facilities, and direct access to the city’s BeltLine within the greater Ponce City Market campus. According to a recent press release, the building is targeting net-zero carbon operations as well as LEED v.4 Core & Shell and Fitwel certifications, all of which would still be achievable with the use of timber that was sustainably sourced from Canada or Europe.

This latest development, however, represents a welcome change. As such, Jamestown estimates that 619 Ponce’s overall emissions are reduced by 60% compared to a mass timber structure using European wood.

“It was astounding that we had all this raw product surrounding us but no way to process it,” says Jamestown’s president Michael Phillips. “It was cheaper to source it from 3000-plus miles away. Putting aside the carbon impacts of that, just in terms of costs, when you consider the premium that CLT requires anyway, then add an incentive to not buy local, well, that was the thing we focused on.”

Jamestown manages close to 100,000 acres of timberlands across Georgia, Alabama, New York, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, all of it managed under the latest SFI Forest Management Standard. The southern yellow pine used for 619 Ponce came exclusively from Georgia forests, including timberland located near the city of  Columbus, roughly equidistant between Atlanta and Dothan, Alabama, where in 2020 SmartLam opened a regional mass timber plant with the capacity to produce several million board feet of CLT and glulam annually.

(Interestingly, Maine was in the running to host this plant—SmartLam’s second in North America—but Dothan easily won out in the end owing to lower labor and lumber costs, as well as “ample room to expand on-site,” according to a 2022 article in Green & Healthy Maine Homes.)

The Georgia-sourced sawtimber was then transported approximately 90 miles southeast to Georgia-Pacific’s sawmill in Albany, where it was converted to lumber, then 85 miles west to the Dothan plant, where the lumber was converted into CLT panels and glulam beams and columns.

Getting to cost parity

For Phillips, the challenge of successfully tapping into regional supply chains while achieving cost parity comes down to a question of demand. “It’s easy to say: we don’t have the expertise or we don’t have the training. Well, we don’t have these things because we don’t desire the product. And I think that’s changing quite rapidly.”

Of course, even with rapidly expanding production capacity in the Northwest, Southeast, and a handful of points in between, any insistence from U.S. builders to buy local will come with caveats.

On the one hand, it’s still cheaper to source timber from overseas. On the other hand, the cost premium associated with constructing a mass timber building also translates into higher rents, which many tenants are willing and able to pay. “Wood feels better. It’s healthier and it makes for such a better tenant experience,” Pfeiffenberger says.

Adding context to that, Phillips highlights southern yellow pine’s “very specific look” relative to other softwood species and is confident that local touch will be evident for tenants and their customers. Additionally, investors tend to like the fact that mass timber projects, particularly ones in thriving urban markets, are typically more efficient and less disruptive because the parts are prefabricated, and the construction sites don’t trigger weeks-long gridlock for surrounding blocks.

To achieve cost parity and not incur additional premiums for sourcing locally, Phillips says they were able to convince and incentivize Georgia-Pacific to make this end-to-end solution competitive because of those very incentives for tenants to pay more for the privilege of operating in a building that embodies ESG solutions. “This building has achieved the highest rental rates in the city of Atlanta. Another metric is that all the investors in [619 Ponce] are non-U.S. based.”

Supply outpaces demand

Despite the environmental platitudes and proselytizing about mass timber’s benefits, any incentives to enter into local supply chains will come down to scalability and reduced costs. Yes, faster build schedules and higher rents are attractive, but only to those companies with foresight or, at minimum, a willingness to invest long term. Clearly, the U.S. is late to that party as well.

As manufacturing capacity continues to grow throughout North America, save for the Northeast (!?), stakeholders can take some comfort that forest growth rates in the U.S. far exceed harvest rates. In 2022, the journal Sustainability published a peer-reviewed analysis of sustainable timber supply for mass timber in the U.S., in which its authors concluded that “even the most optimistic projections of mass timber growth will not exceed the lowest expected annual increases in the nation’s harvestable coniferous timber inventory.”

Researchers considered future projections (2035 and beyond) and determined that, with the highest estimated demand coupled with the lowest estimate of forest inventory, forest growth would still exceed harvest rates by 18%.

In other words, there’s room to grow. While by no means should we take this is a cue to clear cut and establish production plants by the hundreds overnight (Don’t shop when you’re hungry, as the saying goes), we can look upon these data as an opportunity to build more and better regional supply chains, with reduced costs and emissions going hand in hand.

Projects like 619 Ponce need not be the outlier. According to Phillips, “we’d like to think that our mass timber solution can become a branded outcome and have a specific product identifier as part of that.”

When he calls the project “a test,” he’s referencing not what got built but how it got built. “The pipeline is a test,” he says. “It’s a pipeline for projects throughout the Southeast.”

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