Sustainable engineered wood products made from cross-laminated timber, or CLT, are starting to turn up in projects in New England as architects look for ways to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.
Cross-laminated timber, or CLT, is viewed as “greener” then concrete or steel because carbon emissions from production of wooden materials is lower. The timber is formed of several layers of lumber boards, stacked in alternating directions and glued to form one panel.
According to Energy News, it is much stronger than traditional lumber.
Since the University of Massachusetts incorporated CLT construction to its campus three years ago, the material has turned up in a number of other large projects, Energy News reports. Two firms designing an affordable housing project implementing CLT in Boston hope it will become a prototype for sustainable architecture.
“Boston has a very progressive design, engineering, construction and development community, and carbon is the new hot topic,” said John Klein, chief executive officer of Generate Architecture + Technologies, a startup focused on mass-timber building solutions based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
