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Project teams looking for building materials and systems with a lower environmental impact are increasingly eyeing wood — specifically cross-laminated timber (CLT), a type of mass timber that, research has shown, rivals concrete and steel in performance but has a smaller environmental footprint.

Still, supply-side challenges have made it hard for mass-timber products to gain a foothold in the U.S. market. Mill owners have proven generally unwilling to update their production lines to make large CLT panels until there is a steady demand, but demand won’t pick up until material prices come down and local codes become more accepting of the new material. And that’s not likely to happen until supply increases, and with it the number of real-world projects.

At the Urban Land Institute’s Washington Real Estate Trends Conference, held in Washington, DC, on April 25, distributors, developers and architects shared their views on the future of mass timber for construction.

While CLT has been used in buildings across the globe, U.S. markets have been slower to adopt it for structural applications, especially in high-rise buildings. Already, CLT projects in the U.K., such as Stadthaus, in London; Bergen, Norway’s Treet; and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada’s Brock Commons, which is currently the tallest mass-timber structure in the world; stand nine stories or higher — two stories more than the tallest mass-timber building in the U.S.

Europe is already home to a number of mass-timber high-rises that stand taller than six stories, and several others are currently in progress, according to Steve White, principal and director of Washington, DC–based Fentress Architects. Still, the U.S. lags Canada and some European countries in its use of structural CLT. That’s in part due to difficulties reconciling local building codes with CLT’s properties, said Jean-Marc Dubois, director of business development for distributor Nordic Structures.

Read more from ConstructionDIVE at http://www.constructiondive.com/news/how-clt-could-change-the-us-building-landscape/441702/.