• Flashback: The engineered wood industry is betting its future on high-tech certified construction materials and tight relationships with customers, reported Jim Bowden on July 4, 2012. Trouble is competitors in South America, Canada and Asia are all vying for the same markets.
“We’d better be good,” says Simon Dorries, General Manager, Engineered Wood Products Association of Australasia, who points to a diverse range of engineered wood products that is keeping the sector at the top end of the market.
“We’re competing with everyone,” he says.
Mr Dorries is convinced the ‘green credentials’ of plywood and wood panel manufacturers will continue to win substantial government and private commercial building projects, “even though we are competing with imports that often fail Australian standards – and some products that are wood machined in China from native timbers grown in Australia.”
He says through product innovation, unrivalled service and support, and the strictest adherence to Australasian building codes and compliance, the engineered wood industry is well placed for the future.
“EWPAA members have continuously, over a long history, provided the building and construction sectors with a ‘gold standard’ for certified products, a standard unmatched by overseas competitors,” Mr Dorries said. “The big focus for EWPAA continues to be ensuring EWPs going to market are fit for purpose.”
The association’s quality control program is an industry leader and the benchmark for other wood manufacturing industries.
“In these hard trading times, EWPAA is moving to fortify its base to ensure the association continues into the future, so the industry must be ready to act on competitive products, including timber imports,” Mr Dorries said.
“Forest and wood products businesses that are agile and prepared for the next cycle will steal the march on competitors.”
Mr Dorries said conferences like the recent Frame Australia in Melbourne continued to talk up the diversity and application of EWPs such as innovative engineered flooring (sanded, sealed and coated in the factory with a high quality surface finish, ready for easy installation), structural plywood and specialised products such as LVL scaffold planks.
“Our members are analysing their approach and looking at architecture, high-density multi-storey building systems and factory-built components and cross-laminated timber technology to find the most efficient and cost-effective ways to move ahead,” Mr Dorries said.
The expanding role of plywood and LVL in diverse range of formwork applications is also generating high interest. The formwork market absorbs 40% of plywood and 40% of LVL produced by EWPAA member companies.
One of plywood’s principal attractions for formwork is its workability; it can be sawn, drilled, routed and bent to tight curves and fixed in place with a variety of standard fastenings.
“This workability, together with the range of shapes that large plywood sheets can economically achieve, have extended the frontiers of concrete design,” Mr Dorries said. “The last 30 years has seen plywood prove its worth in formwork construction against increasingly stringent requirements for load carrying capacity and surface quality.”
“Faster construction methods and more vigorous concrete placing techniques have more than doubled the pressures plywood formwork must resist.”
“The demands for the concrete surface to have visual qualities in addition to the structural function of the concrete member have been answered by plywoods and LVL with improved surface characteristics and reliable structural design properties.”
Mr Dorries said ever-improving manufacturing technologies together with EWPAA’s total quality control program gave the user confidence that PAA-branded plywood and LVL were products of consistent reliable strength, stiffness and dimensional stability.
He added that plywood’s cross-laminated structure gave great resistance to impact loads.
The versatility of engineered wood is no more evident than in the fit-out of the new $600 million Supreme Court complex in Brisbane where hoop pine plywood dominates much of the building’s design.
The Multiply sheets for benches and seats – more than 12,000 of them – have been manufactured by Austral Plywoods, Brisbane, using a revolutionary cross-banded engineering process.
The 2400 x 1200 sheets are used for all benches and seating in every court room with thick12 mm seven-ply AC hoop pine also used for the walls.
Sales manager Gary Holmes is excited about the use of the cross-banded plywood produced on an Italian 1.2 m lathe, representing the best of European technology.
“We used 32 mm Multiply for the seating and the benches were three layers of 18 mm Multiply making up 54 mm thick benches. With the three layers we made the middle sheet as a cross-banded ply so that when the ply was cut and joined it looked like one sheet of 54 mm ply. Combined there were about 40 sheets of 1.5 mm Multiply, giving a beautiful edge to the work.”
Austral Plywoods has also supplied about 12,000 sheets of 19 mm AC interior plywood for all the wall linings in the Perth Arena an entertainment and sporting complex to open in the city’s centre in November.
An industry-driven organisation, the EWPAA remains fiercely independent of government support and is voluntarily funded by veneer, plywood, LVL and wood panel manufacturers in Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Fiji.
