From 14 to 16 November 2022, the urban foresight think tank La Fabrique de la Cité and Leonard, the VINCI Group’s innovation platform, organised a learning expedition to Helsinki to draw inspiration from the innovative activities in force in the Finnish capital for the construction and infrastructure professions.
To meet the climate challenge, a growing number of cities are looking to use wood in their construction programmes. This renewable material has many advantages in terms of durability and flexibility. However, the wood industry is still very dependent on fossil fuels as coal, oil, fuel oil and gas are still widely used to transport the trees and to process them in the factory. This is not the only problem… The large-scale development of wood construction could weaken forest ecosystems, leading in the long run to a drastic decrease in biodiversity and a lower carbon sequestration in wooded areas.
For all these reasons, the new challenge is to build with wood while protecting the resource and the environment. How can this be achieved? From the forest to the building site, what are the solutions to guarantee the sustainable development of the wood sector? What can we learn from the Finnish example?
Wood as a sustainable resource?
In Finland, wood has long been used to build houses and residential areas. The company Puutalo Oy, founded in 1940, is an example of Finnish know-how in this field. After the war, it became the largest exporter of prefabricated wooden houses in the world. “These houses were not made to last forever, but decades later there are still thousands of them on every continent. One of the reasons they have held up so well is the simplicity of their design. Almost all of their components are made of wood,” explains Kristo Vesikansa.
Completed in 2020, the new Honkasuo district in northwest Helsinki also demonstrates Finnish leadership in this field. Made up of a multitude of small terraced houses, this district has become a world reference for this type of construction. “We want to develop timber construction on a large scale, but also on a local scale. We want to export wooden houses or maybe even cities. We want to become zero-emission,” says Petri Heino.
Ensuring the sustainability of the timber industry requires sustainable forest management. In Finland, the focus is on the ratio of wood used to the number of trees felled. To minimise waste, every tree used is integrated into the production process as much as possible.
Decarbonising the value chain
In addition, efforts are being made to decarbonise the entire value chain, from the cutting of the trees, through their transport, storage, sawing and processing. To achieve this, Finnish wood producers are increasingly investing in biofuels, renewable energy and bioplastics. Representative of this change, the Äänekoski bioproducts plant, a new generation low-carbon infrastructure that cost €1.2 billion, opened in 2018 to produce pulp sustainably.
Industrialising value chains
The question of developing wood construction sectors was the subject of a round table discussion that brought together Frédéric Carteret, President of France Bois Industries Entreprises (FBIE), Petri Heino, Director of the Wood Construction Programme at the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, Armelle Langlois, Director of the Sustainable Construction Division of VINCI Construction in France, and Mikka Pesonen, Sales Director of Stora Enso, a global player in wood construction products. The aim was to consider the extent to which the Finnish model, which has passed the stage of industrialisation, could inspire French builders to scale up and how the two countries can meet the challenge of the sustainability of their development model.
Creating value chains
It should be noted that Finland, which is two-thirds the size of France, is one of the world’s leading exporters of this natural resource, with forests covering three-quarters of its territory. But it is not only this characteristic that explains the scaling up of timber construction in this country… Over time, the State has succeeded in structuring a sector that takes into account all the links in the chain, from the planting of the trees to the delivery of the final product, including the construction of the building site.
While France has a large number of hyper-specialised entities, Finland has taken the opposite path by relying on an inclusive model, notably by developing public/private partnerships that rely on local authorities, construction professionals and the academic community. “Timber construction companies operate as forest owners, builders, manufacturers, sawyers, etc. This operation constitutes an entire value chain, which is constantly evolving to remain competitive, like Stora Enso, which is developing a range of prefabricated wood modules for construction. In France, it is important today to bring everyone together so that we can move forward properly and meet the environmental challenges that lie ahead,” analyses Frédéric Carteret.
Legislation that encourages the development of wood construction
In addition, timber construction is strongly encouraged in the main national planning documents, in particular through the National Timber Programme, which was set up in 2016 with the aim of drawing up regulations and developing regional skills, as Petri Heino, Director of the Timber Construction Programme at the Finnish Ministry of the Environment, points out. The aim of this programme is to increase the market share of wood construction in public buildings to 45% by 2025.
In France, the legal texts also represent the beginning of a response to advance the sector. “We have moved from thermal regulations to environmental regulations for all new buildings and the big news is that we will have to count greenhouse gas emissions. To do this, we have to favour materials that are less and less emissive, because the thresholds of this regulation are lowered every year. There is now a very strong desire to favour everything that is biosourced, and in particular wood,” says Armelle Langlois, director of VINCI Construction’s sustainable construction division in France.
