ENVIRONMENT

Vancouver is leading the way in green construction by building wooden skyscrapers. The city, in Canada’s westernmost province of British Columbia, is already home to an 18-storey timber tower. Now there are plans to build even higher with the Canada Earth Tower (pictured above), a 40-storey timber structure that, at the time of completion, will be the world’s tallest wooden building. The Canada Earth Tower will be made predominately out of fire-resistant cross-laminated timber (CLT). CLT carries much less of an environmental impact than concrete, which produces up to 8% of the world’s carbon emissions. Indeed, the Earth Tower’s energy requirements will be just a third of a conventional building of the same size, and it will have a massively lower ecological footprint from both its construction and operational methods.
Bruce Langereis, the president of the development company behind the project, believes Earth Tower could be replicated worldwide to become the new norm for tall building construction. “We hope people won’t focus on merely the form of the building, but also the content and what it tries to deliver,” he told Daily Hive. “Our goal is really simple: we hope for a call of courage from the city, from us, and other developers to change the way now on how we do things. We don’t have an unlimited time with the climate emergency we face.” As well as constructing the Earth Tower, there are also plans to develop the world’s first mass timber district along Vancouver’s waterfront.
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