A new bipartisan push to ramp up timber production across the United States is purpose-built for an Australian-engineered wood system that has spent fifteen years solving the problem CLT and glulam were never designed for — affordable, low-carbon construction in the housing and mid-rise markets that mass timber has largely failed to reach.
That is according to Pat Thornton, the Australian developer and co-founder of Loggo, an engineered system that converts waste peeler cores and small-diameter plantation logs into structural building products — material that commercial markets have historically left behind. Loggo will be one of the exhibitors at the International Mass Timber Conference in Portland, Oregon, starting today, and promises a manufacturing return on investment of more than 100 per cent for partners who invest in the system.
Thornton says the US policy environment has never been more aligned with what Loggo was built to do. Donald Trump’s executive order on the immediate expansion of American timber production, backed by a February directive from USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins to ramp up Forest Service grant programmes, explicitly targets byproducts of active forest management — low-value material that has historically gone to landfill or burned in forest kilns.
It is the same material that first brought Thornton to the University of Technology Sydney more than fifteen years ago, where Professor Keith Crews tested small-diameter thinnings in a programme that would seed the entire Loggo concept. “We learned that our lamination methods had substantially increased the stiffness over and above what was expected,” Thornton said.
From thinnings, the system evolved to incorporate peeler cores — the cylindrical waste left after veneer is stripped from logs in the plywood industry. At the time Loggo began working with them, peeler cores were either going to landfill or being burned in forest kilns. Loggo developed an extensive in-house testing programme to transform them into structurally engineered wood products capable of spanning the distances commercial construction actually demands.
The laminated column and cassette system that emerged — beams and columns fabricated from minimally processed round logs between 50 and 90 millimetres in diameter, assembled via end-cleated bolt connections — spans 2.4 to six metres, with Loggo’s sweet spot being four- to six-storey buildings. Foundation costs drop substantially compared with concrete or steel alternatives — a factor Thornton says most economists still fail to model correctly at the early stage.
Whilst peeler cores in Australia are largely a zero-cost waste stream requiring minimal handling, Thornton says the labour economics in American supply chains may actually favour pole timber — small-diameter round logs drawn directly from thinning operations — as the more commercially viable feedstock. “Stakeholders in the forest chain can be at a cost advantage over the peeler core resource as there are large savings in manufacturing by not having to lengthen the EWPs,” he said. “This pole timber may be more cost-effective in chains where the peeler cores require substantially less labour, such as the U.S.”
That distinction means Loggo’s US application is not simply a transplant of the Australian model — it is a reconfiguration that maps directly onto the forestry resource the Trump administration is now trying to mobilise. The broader trade context only sharpens the case.
Thornton argues that Covid-era dumping of low-quality engineered wood products from developing countries — accompanied by a chronic lack of quality control on structural building products — has pushed the US toward supply-chain sovereignty as national policy. “Quite rightly culminating in a state of sovereignty-first protectionism,” he said, “of this nationally strategic resource.”
Loggo, which holds more than 70 patents across product design, manufacturing, machinery, and construction methods, is protected from the moment it enters those markets. The system is not positioned as a rival to CLT or glulam — its intended ground is the affordability segment, housing and mid-rise multi-residential, where concrete and steel dominate by default, not by merit.
A three-storey, 15-unit walk-up built from Loggo uses an estimated 41 cubic metres of timber, against more than 190 cubic metres if built from CLT — a gap Thornton describes not as a marketing claim, but as the commercial argument. “Trump’s executive order is now a more urgent, level-headed thinking that almost necessitates Loggo’s adoption,” he said, “and will inspire its proliferation into larger, more complex projects.”
As Wood Central reported last week, Loggo will be present at Booth 770 of the International Mass Timber Conference in Portland, Oregon, later today — alongside Taiwanese machinery developer Cliff Chang of SK Global Co. Ltd. At the conference, Peter Blair, chief consultant for Loggo, will introduce a 20-to-1 scale model frame of an American mid-rise apartment block.
