Construction of wooden mid-rise and high-rise buildings, as well as the incorporation of wood into the interior and exterior of buildings, is gradually increasing in the Tohoku region.
Major real estate developers and construction companies are focusing on wood, pushed by legislation and systems encouraging the use of domestically produced lumber created amid the trend of decarbonization.

The country's forestry industry, however, is losing industrial competitiveness because of the decline of people engaging in the business and dwindling lumber prices.

The forestry industry is trying to take advantage of the business opportunity through adopting digital technologies and improving supply chains.

“Mid-rise and high-rise wooden buildings are shifting from the phase of assessing whether they are technologically viable to the phase of whether they can be chosen by clients and users,” said Hiroyuki Adachi, managing director of Shelter, a wooden architecture construction firm in the city of Yamagata, during a seminar in Sendai in July.

According to the infrastructure ministry, construction began for a total of 59 mid-rise wooden buildings with between four and nine stories across Japan in fiscal 2024, which ended in March this year.

Since the 1970s, Shelter has been working on developing technologies to enhance the strength of wooden buildings and boost the efficiency of constructing them.

In 2021, the firm completed the construction of Takaso Mokko Building, Japan’s first fully wooden seven-story building, in front of Sendai Station in the city of Sendai.

“If local businesses start taking on the challenge of constructing wooden buildings using locally produced lumber, the system of distributing lumber and returning the profits to forests will change,” Adachi said.

Attempts to use more wood in buildings spread after the government took legislative actions to encourage such moves amid growing interest in decarbonization and sustainability.

In 2010, Japan enacted a law to promote the use of wood materials in public buildings. The law was amended in 2021 to expand the scope of promoting wood use to buildings in general.

Along with the development of highly heat-resistant and durable wooden construction materials and accelerated technological innovations, major real estate developers and construction firms are ramping up the use of wood.

In 2019, Mitsubishi Estate built the 10-story Park Wood Takamori in Sendai, the country’s first high-rise apartment building that uses cross-laminated timber — prefabricated, solid engineered wooden panels that are lightweight yet very strong — as floor material.

Since then, the company has been expanding the use of wooden materials in a variety of structures, including airports and hotels.

Initially, there were challenges in producing wooden materials, making wooden buildings about 30% more expensive to construct than reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. But the situation has improved as the use of wooden materials has become more widespread.

Amid a rise in the prices of construction materials such as ready-mixed concrete, Mitsubishi Estate’s subsidiaries are receiving inquiries from those wishing to switch to wooden materials.

“In mid-rise buildings (of roughly three to five stories), we are beginning to see a price advantage in wooden structures and wooden materials,” said a Mitsubishi Estate official. “Another advantage is that the construction period is shorter compared with RC buildings.

“We hope to achieve more results in high-rise buildings as well.”

While the range of the use of wood expands, the forestry industry that supplies the material is facing challenges.

“The price gap between domestically produced wood and foreign wood is not that big,” said Ryota Kajiwara, head of the corporate planning office at Miyagijujo Group, a major forestry firm in Sendai that produces roughly 150,000 cubic meters of timber a year.

“The biggest weakness (of the domestic forestry industry) is its unstable supply system, attributable to the fact that many of the forestry firms are small.”

Domestic timber prices temporarily rose during the global “wood shock” that began in 2021, but they have since stagnated.

The forestry industry has been hit by further problems including a decrease in housing construction — the mainstay of its business — and rising costs of producing lumber.

About 60% of man-made forests in Japan are 50 years old or older since saplings were first planted.

These forests are now ready for full-scale harvesting, but logging has stalled due to the declining profitability of the forestry industry. The reforestation rate of logged forests also remains low, at about 20% to 30%.

In order to achieve a stable supply of domestic lumber, Miyagijujo Group is working on establishing a traceability system to keep track of the logging process.

The firm is also working to increase efficiency through the use of digital technologies. To confirm forest boundaries, it is adopting an app that utilizes the Geographic Information System, rather than relying on the conventional method of checking paper maps. It uses drones to survey reforested areas.

“The forestry industry has been an analog industry, meaning there is a lot of room for productivity improvement,” Kajiwara said. “By following the global trends of SDGs (sustainable development goals) and ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance), we hope to seize the opportunity by making use of Japan’s strength of having a rich accumulation of man-made forests.”
 

Source:  japantimes.co.jp