EAST LANSING, Mich.—A particular item on the agenda for East Lansing’s Commission on the Environment at their most recent meeting on Sept. 16 concerned the use of mass timber as opposed to concrete for future development.
Mass timber, as opposed to “heavy timber,” is an engineered wood product that is composed of layers of wood bonded together and has a high load-bearing potential. In the case of East Lansing, mass timber has been considered across a variety of different types of zoning as a building material. However, regulations regarding using alternative materials in construction like the city’s special use permits (SUPs), particularly for residential projects, have become a center of debate.
Since the summer of 2023, the city’s Mass Timber Subcommittee has studied mass timber’s impact on both the environment and local community. Meetings of the committee involved a spectrum of stakeholders, including Lansing lobbying firm Midwest Strategy Group and other local officials.
The result of these interactions was a proposed alternative approach to local development that aims to incentivize renewable resource alternatives to building. This proposed plan utilizes a point system where developers can earn points by incorporating community needs into a project. These points can be used towards rewards, such as expanded building height, which can increase development profitability. The proposal introduces a gamification of the development process.
Furthermore, the proposal intends to change the construction permitting process for high-density residential projects like apartment buildings by reducing the need for SUPs. SUPs are an approval system for a property to be constructed outside of its typical limits, including requirements such as building materials. Proponents of the ordinance change, such as local development companies, hope that the change will bypass the SUP process and streamline the logistics of building with other materials like mass timber.
“From my understanding, it’s a lobbying firm who’s behind [the proposal],” said Cliff Walls, environmental sustainability and resiliency manager of East Lansing. “It’s an important context in understanding how we ended up here.”
Walls said that the council can’t take the words of the groups interviewed by the subcommittee at face value.
“East Lansing developers have, for a long time, had a lot to say about the special use permit process having a chilling effect on development,” Walls said. “Of course, you’re going to hear that from those trying to [change the process].”
During the commission meeting, other members added that it could be a “cover story” to allow building tall, fast and with loose regulations.
As the discussion continued, concerns were raised about the sustainability of building with mass timber in the first place and how the impacts of the building process should affect the council’s decision-making.
Professor George Berghorn of Michigan State, who specializes in research around sustainable wood construction, said that mass timber has both pros and cons to its usage. In addition to construction speed and fewer disturbances, Berghorn said that the material is uniquely equipped to capture carbon.
“Wood is a renewable material and wood is also approximately 50% carbon,” he said. “So, there’s a significant amount of stored atmospheric carbon in a large mass timber structural element that will now be kept out of the atmosphere for a significant period of time.”
Berghorn said that over the last three decades, there were more trees grown in America than there were harvested. The majority of direct mass timber challenges come from it being a newer building material, he said.
“It is still a relatively new [building] material in the U.S., so knowledge about its use and how it can be deployed on projects is relatively low,” Berghorn said. “We don’t have a lot of workforce training or educational programs built around it yet.”
According to Berghorn, the supply chain for mass timber products, even grown domestically, can be a relatively long process and much of the mass timber in the U.S. still comes from Europe and Canada.
Professional forester Brenda Haskill works as the Michigan Department of Natural Resources’s (DNR) unit manager for their timber sale program. She said that there isn’t a mass timber manufacturer in the state, adding to unsustainable out-of-state shipping practices.
Haskill said that for a new Michigan DNR building in Newberry, timber was sourced sustainably in Michigan, but it had to be shipped elsewhere for manufacturing to be made into the mass timber used in construction.
“This is the hard part, and we try not to say this too much because we do realize the environmental impact of this process, but it was important to us to be able to showcase that Michigan wood was being used for a Michigan facility,” she said. “We actually had to ship that locally grown and harvested red pine all the way to the west coast to a manufacturing facility where they put it together and sent it back to us.”
Haskill said that while the state has processes in place to replant, private companies don’t play by the same rules.
“We are bound by lots of different criteria to manage forest land on the statewide forest scale for all the citizens of the state, and we don’t adjust those management schemes to accommodate higher demand for a wood product,” Haskill said. “So all that to say, we’re not going to go out and more intensively harvest pine, spruce and fir to meet demand for mass timber.”
“I can’t say anything about private lands. Private landowners are going to do what they want,” she said.
Despite supply concerns and the practices of private companies, Berghorn said that East Lansing is a city “on the leading edge of innovation” and that its investments in this new form of construction have already begun to pay off.
By Liam Clymer
Michigan State University students study on the MSU Stem Building’s second and third floors. The MSU Stem Building was built using mass timber beams in 2021.In 2022, MSU garnered attention from the non-profit educational division of the American Wood Products Council, called WoodWorks. The organization provided the MSU STEM Facility with an award for its usage of mass timber.
The benefits of mass timber production can be aesthetic in addition to being sustainable, Berghorn said.
“There’s some research that’s been done both on people’s reaction to the aesthetic — the way it appears — and there’s also been research that’s been done on people’s health, well-being and productivity when they’re working in spaces that have more natural material in them,” he said.
“So, there’s this biophilic effect [meaning affinity or connection toward other living things] that people are less stressed, more productive at work and they do better in school when they’re around natural materials,” Berghorn said.
East Lansing’s Commission on the Environment still has much to consider about the city’s future in mass timber. The commission meets every third Monday of the month at 6:30 p.m. More information can be found on the commission’s website.