How sustainable building materials could help the construction sector overcome worker shortages

To some, the term "sustainability" is synonymous with higher costs, more labour and more hassle, but as the construction sector grapples with severe worker shortages, going green could be a saving grace. 

The new St Lukes Health headquarters in Tasmania has been pitched as one of the most sustainable offices in the country, largely due to its use of engineered wood products such as cross-laminated timber and glued laminated timber, or glulam.

While these products cost more than conventional materials such as concrete, St Lukes Health director of strategy Martin Rees believes they are worth it.

"It's definitely a more expensive way to construct at the moment, but the offset is that you can construct more rapidly," he said.

"Also, when you're going to do a fit-out, you leave exposed timber, so you're not putting ceilings and other coverings over the top of the concrete, and that's a saving."

'Like a Meccano set'

The 28-metre-tall St Lukes Health headquarters will rise from the brick base of a 19th-century building in Launceston.

The engineered wood products provide structural strength by combining layers of timber with industrial glues.

Mr Rees said they allowed builders to construct "about a floor a week" once they were "out of the ground".

"It's a bit like a Meccano set," he said.

"It's constructed inside out, where you don't need scaffolding."

Mr Rees hoped the project would serve as a proof-of-concept for others wanting to embrace sustainable materials.

Skills and supply shortages

Master Builders Tasmania chief executive Matthew Pollock said the sector was willing to look at "anything" to cut down on labour, especially amid tough competition for workers from a booming mining sector.

"The skills shortage in construction has been an acute issue for several years and then made substantially worse through the COVID years," he said.

"In Tassie, we estimate that in order to achieve the pipeline of work ahead – so 30,000 new homes over the next 10 years and a little over $20 billion in infrastructure – we'll need to grow the construction workforce by 25 per cent by 2025."

Mr Pollock said there was "strong interest" in decarbonising the construction process, but the adoption of sustainable materials was hampered by limited supplies.

Australia already has to import construction timber and the country is well behind the more advanced engineered timber industries of Europe.

"It's an industry in its infancy [in Australia], but it's a fantastic product," Mr Pollock said.

"One of the silver linings out of COVID is that businesses are looking for local producers and local supply chains that are not exposed to the types of international disruption that we've seen over the last couple of years."

A sea of new materials

Designers and developers wanting to decarbonise their projects often have to navigate a tangle of emerging materials, each with their own environmental attributes.

Regenerative practices coordinator Adrian Taylor from architect collective BVN said it was not possible to simply swap a carbon-heavy product like concrete for timber.

"They don't work the same," he said.

"They have different structural qualities, very different costs, both in terms of time and money, and they have different constraints in terms of what you can do with them."

Mr Taylor also said some materials posed "a lot of effort" because they required various different certifications.

But he said initiatives such as Architects Declare were helping the industry pool research and resources to ease the individual burden of embracing sustainable construction.

"Within any kind of industry that works by creative IP (intellectual property), people hold cards close to their chest," Mr Taylor said.