Scottish CLT Plant on the Horizon

A report in The Herald in Scotland has revealed a ‘bold’ property move by CCG that is intended to pave the way for an innovative new manufacturing plant which would give Scotland a UK first.

The £100m turnover construction and development firm CCG has revealed plans to expand its offsite manufacturing expertise into cross laminated timber (CLT). It has bought a new 122,000 sq ft production plant called Titan at Eurocentral for £4.15m, where it is proposing to establish a factory manufacturing CLT.

The company's existing offsite facilities at Glasgow East Investment Park has a 130,000 sq ft operation capable of producing up to 3000 closed timber panel buildings a year, often complete with features such as insulation, doors, windows and external claddings in brick or render. CCG has been working on the idea for three years, and, with support from Scottish Enterprise, initiated a project with Napier University to test the market, future potential, competition and feasibility, which confirmed there was a robust case for this concept.

It then took some homegrown timber, machined and dried to the required moisture content, over to Germany for manufacture into test panels by a company called Derix. These were delivered to a technical institute in Graz in Austria and tested for viability.

Chairman and Chief Executive Alastair Wylie, said: “Timber is a favourable product in terms of carbon footprint in construction, and we believe that this aspect is very important to the industry and will continue to be high on the national agenda. I know of no other firm that can build to the same extent offsite as we can – in a housing form – in the UK. We already have our manufacturing knowledge, we've done our homework, and the statistics all point in the right direction.

“People who have researched this for us have told us there is a tremendous demand for this product, with national UK companies receptive to modern methods of construction like this, reducing wastage and inefficiency and helping to address weather-related issues.”

The work at Napier was led by Dr Robert Hairstains, Head of the Centre for Offsite Construction & Innovative Structures (COCIS) and was co-funded by Scottish Enterprise. He said: “Currently the UK primarily imports CLT and this would be the first large-scale CLT production facility in the UK, which many architects and engineers have hoped to see. The next step will hopefully be the integration of homegrown timber into the facility, which our research has shown is technically feasible once supply chain issues are resolved. And if that happens it will be a significant boost to the Scottish and UK economies.”

Wylie acknowledges that investing £4m in Titan is a big move for this private-funded business, but remains confident enough to have circulated the footprint and autocad drawings of his newly-acquired building round five CLT equipment manufacturers and installers in Germany. The custom-built equipment, with lines capable of adding higher value elements such as external finishes, would take nine months to manufacture, and perhaps the same again before it could be operational.

Original Link - Herald Scotland