Around secular economy, there's the narrative of rising rising material costs, rising price volatility. And we really saw that this year in the UK with timber prices going through the roof because of pressures from all kinds of directions. And this is likely to be something that continues. So I think more than ever, there's a there's a pertinence of of looking at reuse of timber comes to the fore. And yet still skips are full of timber. I only have to walk around my neighborhood to see half a dozen skips. This one's quite an extreme one, but there's a lot of woods going in skips because people are converting their lofts and particularly in the light of home working. And actually we're doing our own loft and so the first the first batch of timber that's going into our testing programs is from my roof and there it is having been reclaimed from the building and taken to our workspace in Stratford. What are we actually doing with it? Well, this is the typical life cycle of timber with a cascading principle that it can go through multiple uses, but with each use it drops away in quality over time until eventually just being energy being recovered. And what that actually looks like in practice is a recycling plant like this where the timber is sorted into different grades and then they're all chipped or incinerated. To make relatively low value products like chipboard, MDF or animal bedding, agricultural paths, all very low value uses. But since we now have the technology to put together small and low grade bits of timber to make cross laminated timber, it seems like this is a a principle that could equally be applied to to reclaimed wood. And perhaps you can, as well as making a new high quality material, perhaps you can also design it for deconstructability so that it doesn't just have one more life, but it has several more potential lives. And what that does is to extend that lifespan and extend the overall carrying capacity of the of the built environment to store carbon. Doesn't stop it from, in the end, still being used to generate energy. I'm not in the I'm not trying to stop stop the incinerators from running, but I think that that should happen once we've got to the point where the sort of material qualities and the residual engineering properties of the material have been used as well as they can. That's the kind of environmental opportunity. In terms of a business opportunity, at the moment contractors and developers pay to dispose of timber and they pay to buy a new CLT. So the challenge is to carry out a manufacturing process which can add enough enough value to the waste wood that it covers the cost of of production. And and lots of things will influence what those numbers are. It's it's not easy to pin them down because it's quite a dynamic field as as we saw last year this this year with the rising cost of new wood. But I think it's also something that we should responsible governments should be trying to align the more sustainable options for how we use waste materials with with and economically viable solutions. So by putting you you can influence the market price that's here, cross laminated secondary timber, might be able to command by making it more important that embodied carbon or whole life carbon is properly regulated within new buildings so that products like this become more desirable to the market. There's a whole question around taxation which feels like it has to change over the course of, you know, over the next few decades. Right now, I think the sort of business viability of making of of doing that whole process of gathering timber from lots of different places, going through a process, you know, process of all the all those different sizes and sorting it, denailing, all those all stages feel like how could you ever make that stack up. But it feels like something which over time the margins have to improve. So do the research now, try to prepare ourselves for years to come when there's far more of a need for or sort of more immediate need to have really low or negative embodied carbon materials. So just looking at the scale of the opportunity, in the UK we dispose something in the region of a million tons of waste wood a year from from demolition alone, another million from construction, another two million from other sources. If you just focus on London's demolition waste and the amount of that which is solid timber, make some reasonable assumptions about how much might be suitable for cross laminated secondary timber and how much you might actually be able to get your hands on and then account for some losses in production. Then at the end of that process you still end up with enough material to make a thousand new dwellings from cross laminated secondary timber. Lots of assumptions there but it seems like a number which is within the realms of of viability. And it's something which is gaining traction. So my my myself and some colleagues wrote the first scientific paper on this topic, but it's getting picked up by by other people and some some research and from European funded projects and some industry take up through Grimshaw Architects in in London and and a developer looking at glulam from secondary timber. There's lots of challenges involved and and the current work I'm doing through the Fleming Blue World Award funding focuses on the technical core of what are the engineering properties of secondary wood and how do those perform when you put them into a laminated panel. But there's lots more sort of before and after that in terms of logistics of collection and business model and also assessing the the what really what the environmental impacts of of those decisions could be. I think a really really interesting one is is working on the design of this factory and the automating. So it's not such a manual process. Also, that the there's a sort of human robot collaboration. And also seeing how much you can get away from the sort of giant CLT plant next to a forest and into something more decentralized, lower cost, so that you can have more plants closer to where the the waste wood is arising, where the demand for new buildings is. Possibly that also means you can get costs down so that this is something that can work in an international development context as well. And lastly, some of the wood that we would take in if this was a business wouldn't be suitable for CLST. So how can you make use of the whole whole of that timber collection through byproducts and and we acknowledge that it might not look the same as new wood and maybe that's a good thing. Maybe we'll see so much spruce everywhere that we actually architects are looking for a new new angle on on cross laminated timber. And so differentiating from from the existing suppliers. And that's that's all I wanted to say now. I I hope that's gives us some starting points for discussion.
