Even before a building accepts its first occupant, it has racked up a steep carbon debt. Worldwide, the materials and construction required to erect buildings contributes 11% of global carbon emissions, according to the World Green Building Council.
Some places have begun experimenting with multistory timber buildings, and while they’ve recently reached new heights, timber buildings won’t be replacing skyscrapers anytime soon. But one Chilean startup thinks that there’s still room for wood to find a place.
“We’re more into hybrid buildings,” Andrés Mitnik, co-founder and CEO of Strong by Form, told TechCrunch. His company has developed a new engineered wood product that can replace concrete and steel in structural floors, allowing architects to design lighter, less carbon intensive buildings. The company is a Startup Battlefield Top 20 finalist and is presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt, which runs this week in San Francisco.
The secret is in how those floor plates are made. “We think we can shape wood in a way that no one else has done it before,” he said.
Strong by Form has designed a structural floor piece that can span longer distances than existing engineered wood, making it a replacement for steel or concrete. At the same time, the product is lighter than all three.
On the outside, builders will see something familiar. “When a contractor gets it, they see a CLT [cross-laminated timber] slab,” Mitnik said. “All the connections, the construction system, all the processes on site are exactly as if you were using CLT, so no need to learn new things.”
But inside, instead of more solid wood, like you’d find in a CLT, the structure is filled with cavities. Wood shavings have been pressed into a wavy board that’s optimized to bear heavy loads.
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The wavy panel looks like oriented strand board, or OSB, which is common throughout job sites. But Strong by Form has developed software and a manufacturing technique to tweak the size and alignment of the wood flakes that are held together …