Why Finland is building with wood again
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 27 September 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Could building more homes and offices out of wood instead of concrete help tackle climate change?
We travel to Finland, where growing numbers of homes and offices are being built using wood, and the industry is booming.
We’ll hear how it can help improve sustainability in cities and take a look at the challenges and benefits of using more wood inside our offices and homes.
And we'll also hear concerns about the impact on the country’s famous forests. Presenter Maddy Savage speaks to Miimu Airaksinen - vice president of development at Finnish building company SRV, about the construction process and the technology being used.
Mai Suominen, a senior forest expert for the World Wildlife fund explains the benefits of using wood to make buildings, because they can store carbon that’s already been removed from the atmosphere by trees for decades.
Ali Amiri from Aalto University has been exploring the costs and benefits of using wood for building - and the impact of the war in Ukraine which has increased interest in wood as a building material.
And Maddy gets a tour from Linda Helen of an eight story wooden office block in Helsinki that’s home to one of Finland’s biggest gaming companies Supercell.
Produced and presented by Maddy Savage.
(Image - wooden building in Helskini. Credit: BBC)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the sound of crowd science. |
| 0:02.5 | We shoot a laser beam, Etis Etem. |
| 0:05.1 | Is that a big canister of oxygen in the background? |
| 0:07.8 | Oh, there's a wasp in there. |
| 0:09.3 | Yep. |
| 0:09.7 | That's possibly the most disgusting thing I've heard this week. |
| 0:13.6 | But it's one of the nicest fun facts you're going to hear today. |
| 0:16.4 | So here I'm actually holding a donut. |
| 0:18.3 | What are you going to do with that? |
| 0:19.3 | Find out more at the end of this podcast. |
| 0:26.8 | Hello, I'm Maddie Savage and welcome to Business Daily from Helsinki. |
| 0:32.1 | We're starting at probably the most stereotypically finished place you can imagine. |
| 0:36.6 | A sauna. |
| 0:37.8 | This one's at a windy shoreline spot where you can cool off in the water afterwards. |
| 0:42.7 | Today's program is all about what the building's made of. |
| 0:46.2 | Wood. Not just the inside of the sauna, but the exterior too. |
| 0:50.0 | There's a slanted cloak of smooth wooden beams which wraps around the sauna and restaurant complex. |
| 0:55.8 | It's an example of a growing trend in the Finnish construction industry |
| 0:58.9 | to use wood instead of concrete and steel to try and make buildings more sustainable. |
| 1:04.5 | Wooden millings have 20 to 30% lower greenhouse gas emissions. |
| 1:09.0 | And half of the wood is carbon. |
| 1:10.7 | So we keep the carbon inside |
... |
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