Mass timber’s capacity to lock sequestered carbon inside a building envelope for up to a century is one of the key drivers behind Amazon’s decision to construct its DII5 delivery station in Elkhart, Indiana, from engineered wood, the first in what could be a new wave of mass timber delivery centres.
That is according to Kristen Dotson, Amazon’s Principal for Sustainable Buildings, whose comments come days after Elizabeth Correa, Amazon Global Realty’s mass timber lead, who said warehousing was emerging as one of the fastest-growing markets for cross-laminated timber panels.
Wood Central understands that the 171,341-square-foot facility used more than half a million board feet of 3-ply CLT panels for the walls and roofing alone, all SFI-certified and sourced locally. Dotson said the carbon case for mass timber differed fundamentally from conventional structural materials, because the carbon captured during the tree’s growth remained locked inside the panels for as long as the building stood.
“Trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere, store it in the cells of their fibre,” Dotson said late last week. “If we can lock up that material in the building for 50 to 100 years, we’re creating a carbon ‘bank’ that keeps that sequestered carbon from being re-released into the atmosphere.”
It comes after the International Mass Timber Conference in Portland, Oregon, earlier this month, revealed that up to 10 per cent of all mass timber sold in the United States is now flowing to big tech for data centre and warehouse construction. Buildings and construction account for 40 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Carbon Leadership Forum, a figure Amazon Chief Sustainability Officer Kara Hurst said had prompted the company to ask whether the best available sustainability strategies could operate at full logistics scale without affecting throughput.
“These solutions can be changemakers — and the beauty of this approach is, it doesn’t impact our operations at all,” Hurst said.
Daniel Mallory, Amazon’s Vice President of Global Realty, said DII5 was built to generate comparative data on which technologies delivered the best cost-to-performance ratio at logistics scale, giving the company’s global estate a live evidence base for future builds. “It’s going to help us as we steadily climb toward our sustainability goals,” Mallory said.
Beyond the structural CLT envelope, DII5 substitutes wood studs for metal at internal partitions and wood fibre insulation for fibreglass across wall cavities, with bio-based finishes running through acoustic ceilings and flooring throughout the fitout.
The facility is pursuing Zero Carbon Certification from the International Living Future Institute, a standard Amazon has already achieved at its 700,000 sq ft MCI9 sortation centre, whilst a 56,781-litre underground tank captures and filters roof rainwater for restroom use and more than 170 EV charging stations ring the perimeter: “Before mass timber, we didn’t have a market-ready bio-based structural solution that was competitive with concrete and steel,” Dotson said.
Amazon has since confirmed it will bring mass timber to a second facility at Stockton-on-Tees in the United Kingdom, due to open in autumn 2026, and Meta has recorded a 41 per cent reduction in embodied carbon from replacing concrete and steel with engineered wood across its South Carolina, Wyoming, and Alabama data centre builds.
