Staying local with mass timber

In Millersburg, Ore., a town of about 3,000 residents just south of Salem, the mass timber manufacturer Timberlab is building a 190,000-square-foot plant that will become one of the largest facilities in the U.S. to produce cross-laminated timber, or CLT. Designed by LEVER Architecture, the plant is being built with glulam components produced at the company’s Portland facility using locally harvested timber. The new facility will likewise fabricate products using regional wood supplies. (CLT and glulam are both prominent types of mass timber.)

Timberlab’s expanding operation in the Northwest, plus another facility in Greenville, S.C., embodies a trend within the broader industry of mass timber and engineered wood products: staying local. At present, Oregon has no CLT production. Timberlab is “filling in this supply chain gap,” says CEO Chris Evans. “There is an abundance of this size fiber in the state [but] a limited supply of dried lumber specifically needed for CLT. Our process will use Oregon-grown timber. … Once at full capacity [by 2035], we’ll be able to produce 75 million board feet per year.”  

Going local, or at least contracting one’s product supply chain, makes perfect sense considering one of the biggest value-adds of building with mass timber is reducing the embodied carbon footprint with renewable source materials. “Furthermore, the construction process that utilizes mass timber is less energy-intensive,” wrote principals from Cannon Design in a 2024 blog post. “The lighter-weight timber components, especially when compared to heavy materials like concrete and steel, lead to reduced transportation and installation energy use.” 

Mass timber construction entered the International Building Code in 2015, and a modest mass timber construction boom subsequently began to pick up steam in the U.S. However, a considerable majority of built projects have used foreign-made CLT, glulam, and other components, principally from Europe. There, sophisticated mass timber production has been entrenched for decades. But the tide is shifting along American shores. 

In recent years, multiple regions of the country and a growing number of states have invested their political and economic capital in building out regional infrastructure for the manufacturing of mass timber, with the aim of tapping local forests, lumber mills, and workforces. The desired outcome is for more commercial, industrial, and multifamily buildings to be literal products of their natural environments.

North by Southeast

The first U.S.-based mass timber product manufacturer was Smartlam, which opened a plant in Missoula, Mont., in 2017, producing CLT from regionally sourced Douglas fir, western pines, and spruce varieties harvested in Montana, the Pacific Northwest, and Canada. (Smartlam North America’s current Montana base is in Columbia Falls.) A year later, Smartlam opened a second plant in Dothan, Ala., to take advantage of the 78 million hectares of southern yellow pine forests that dominate the southeastern U.S. (Of all softwoods prevalent in North America, Douglas fir and southern yellow pine are greatly prized for their durability and for making effective feedstocks for all mass timber products.) 

Ryan Lobello, an associate principal with Handel Architects, equates this local, vertically integrated approach to manufacturing with tangential efforts to restore ecosystems. “We’re approaching the use of timber and regional supply chains from a forestry health and fire risk management point of view,” he says. “That’s where you’re getting the most traction with legislatures and city councils, trying to incentivize folks to streamline regional production.”

That philosophy became manifest in the Handel-designed 619 Ponce project, a 115,000-square-foot office and retail development in Atlanta’s Fourth Ward that opened in 2024. The building was constructed from over 740,000 combined board feet of CLT panels and glulam beams made entirely from Georgia-grown southern yellow pine.

The first mass timber project in the state built with regional supply chains was made possible by two factors: First, 619 Ponce’s developer, Jamestown, manages hundreds of thousands of acres of timberland in the Southeast and elsewhere. Second, much of that forest is less than 100 miles from Smartlam’s Dothan facility, where the lumber—milled by Georgia-Pacific in nearby Albany—was shipped to be converted into CLT panels and glulam beams and columns.

When Handel compared the costs of sourcing materials from the Southeast, Northwest, or Austria, the most expensive option was in their backyard, and the cheapest option was across the Atlantic. But “the carbon story for this project was important to the client and to us,” says Lobello, and sourcing Georgia-grown wood, milling it in-state, and sending it across one state line for fabrication was the environmentally responsible choice. 

Strengthening local economies

“When thinking regionally, the biggest thing to consider is the quality of the timber basket and the existing supply chain,” says Evans from Timberlab. “To produce CLT, there is more flexibility to work with a wider range of species, grades, and sawmills to get the right fiber [and] dried to the right moisture content. For glulam, it is a lot harder!”

Expansive manufacturing operations like those of Timberlab, Smartlam, and a handful of others in the contiguous U.S. reveal a growing interest in adopting “forest-to-building” practices. When done correctly, these closed loops benefit local economies and contribute to good forest management.

“As the sustainability conversation evolved in the early 2010s, a shift occurred of people wanting to connect to the forest and building materials” and to adopt a “more vernacular architecture,” says Michaela Harms, vice president of mass timber at Sterling Structural. “The Lorax told us to never cut a tree down, right? Well, let’s actually consider using this regenerative resource [and invest] in these local, regional woodland economies.”

A marquee case study is the ZGF Architects-designed Portland International Airport (PDX), a celebrated mass timber development. The 3.5 million board feet of Douglas fir that comprise PDX’s soaring nine-acre roof came from 11 different landowners in the Portland region. Timberlab performed the fabrication. Other prominent examples include Texas A&M University’s Aplin Center, a mixed-use education building designed by DLR Group that uses CLT and glulam sourced from Texas sawmills, and Western City Campus in Boulder, Colo., the first mass timber project in the state built with Colorado wood. 

Minding the pace

These acts of intentional sourcing are designed to drive further investment in regional manufacturing, which is laudable. Still, there are cautionary tales to consider, notably in the case of Katerra, a startup that saw rapid growth in the late 2010s but collapsed. 

Headline-making excitement over mass timber doesn’t always signal scalable market demand. The U.S. has indeed seen rapid growth in mass timber construction since 2020. However, domestic demand fell 20% in 2024 from the previous year, according to the most recent Mass Timber Performance Index report, co-authored by Roy Anderson and Erica Spiritos, two Oregon-based leaders in the forest products industry.

This lesson isn’t lost on Emory and Zach Baldwin. The uncle-nephew duo is leading a new entity called North Woods Mass Timber, which aims to establish mass timber manufacturing in Maine and supply products to markets in the Northeast. North Woods has selected a site near Bangor and hopes to break ground in the next year, but funding for their venture remains up in the air. Appropriately, the Baldwins are treading lightly. 

“New England, and specifically Maine, is a really good place for CLT production and eventually glulam,” Zach says. (Glulam production typically requires higher-strength fiber due its use for beams and structural columns.) A notable caveat is the area’s abundance of small-diameter trees, dense concentrations of hardwoods, and what he labels “low-value species,” all of which “affect our ability to get quality out of the forest.” Still, he stresses that “there’s a lot of interest” from local landowners, sawmills, and lawmakers for a mass timber facility in the Pine Tree State. 

“Part of the reason we selected this area is to have a much closer relationship with both the sawmills and the landowners, to be part of the region’s economy and closely tied to the fiber,” especially in the state’s northern half, where the quality of wood is superior, Zach says. Of course, this begs the question: Why invest in a region where two manufacturers, Smartlam and LignaCLT, had once made serious overtures but eventually left?

Part of the answer is increased demand. According to Emory, “the northeast is the fastest growing [region] of the mass timber market, [and] the northern forest stretching from northern Maine to northern New York State is the largest contiguous forest in the lower 48." Of note, Pleasant River Lumber, based in Dover, Maine, not far from Bangor, is the sole mill in New England with the capacity to produce machine stress rated (MSR) lumber. Emory also warns that “the industry will eventually implode if there’s not more supply being made in North America, and there’s nothing within 500 miles of New York City or Boston.” 
 
While North Woods’ success isn’t guaranteed, the company’s outlook should be aided by the fact that two different manufacturers, Smartlam and Sterling Structural, recently earned certification to produce CLT from spruce-pine-fir south and eastern hemlock. Those are two major species in Maine’s forest ecosystems. 

Going hyperlocal

When looking holistically at recent market growth in the U.S., it’s worth considering that not all progress needs to happen on a macro-regional scale. Colorado’s Timber Age Systems, based in Durango, is a model case study for how mass timber production can succeed on a hyperlocal scale while contributing to economic stability, improving housing markets, and, in heeding Ryan Lobello’s words, taking “a forestry health and fire risk management point of view.” (Lobello also lives in Colorado and is a member of the state’s Mass Timber Coalition.)

Timber Age is headquartered near southwest Colorado’s wildfire-prone San Juan National Forest, which has an abundance of Ponderosa pine, among other species. The company sources lumber from San Juan’s Ponderosa stands, trucks it a few miles down the road to be milled, and manufactures CLT panels that are used to assemble modular homes. In 2023, Timber Age received a grant from the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) to supply mass timber components for the development of affordable, entry-level homes near Durango. 

“We started with a $500 DeWalt planer and a $1,000 vacuum bag,” says CEO Kyle Hanson, recalling Timber Age’s nascent days from 2018. “Instead of trying to start huge, we wanted to de-risk the thing we were trying to solve.”

Hanson says shortening the distance within the forest-to-building framework is one of his company’s goals. The other is to stay “lean” and generate the least amount of waste possible. “You put the factory in the forest and build the house right outside the factory. If that’s the ideal, then everything you’re doing that is not that needs to have a really, really good reason for existing.”
 
The supply chain approach

The beginnings of the U.S. mass timber movement can be traced, in part, to the work of Craig Rawlings. In 2004, Rawlings and some likeminded entrepreneurs began hosting an annual meeting out of a small ballroom at the Coeur d’Alene Resort in northern Idaho. They named this meeting the Small Log Conference. Its core premise was, “If we’re going to have sustainable supply chains and sustainable products, we’ve got to start from the forest,” Rawlings says. 

Twelve years later, with interest in mass timber construction reaching fever pitch, the group moved to Oregon and rebranded as the International Mass Timber Conference. This move coincided with “a convergence of a lot of things happening at once,” says Rawlings. One major factor was that “the forest products industry finally [recognized] their customers’ needs and concerns regarding sustainable design, good forestry, ESG reporting, and more.”

As Rawlings puts it, “We have always taken supply chain approach.” That very tack has informed the establishment of dozens of state coalitions, regional collaboratives, university-led market accelerators, and private think tanks in recent years.

While market demand, forest management practices, wood species and fiber content, and other factors can differ wildly from one region to the next, the one thing that unites these entities is the desire to develop strong regional infrastructure and find ways to build using what we have. There’s room to grow, but growth itself is the only viable outcome. “Certified wood is good,” Rawlings says. “There's just not enough certified wood.”

Justin R. Wolf is a freelance writer covering architecture and design. He lives in Maine.