Scrimber—a high-value engineered wood product made from crushed thinnings and small trees—is roaring back into focus and could one day dominate the construction industry. That is according to Stefan Zoellig, Dr Steffen Franke, and Dr Bettina Franke, who spoke to Wood Central about new plans to commercialise the technology—which has its roots in CSIRO research dating back to the 1970s—from the sidelines of the World Conference on Timber Engineering today.
Zoellig – CEO and founder of Scrimber CSC – said the push to revive the technology, which has failed to achieve industrial production on multiple occasions, is for three reasons: “One is to bring more yield out of the tree. Nowadays, we have a 30% yield for CLT or glulam. With scrimber, we can bring it up to 90%. (The second) to use underutilised species/assortments, which you cannot usually turn into load-bearing members. And finally, to compete with concrete, where we can prove the material that can store carbon in the buildings for hundreds of years.”
Learning from the past, Zoellig and Dr Steffen Franke said that the past issues were 60% financial and 40% technical: “I don’t think they ran out of time. They ran out of money. It’s always the 3t’s – it’s the time, talent and treasury. So, if you have those three, you can make anything. The money is around. That’s not the problem. There’s plenty of money and plenty of money looking exactly for this type of investment. But you have to structure it,” Zoellig said.
“We are open for investments”
Now speaking to interested partners, Zoellig said past versions of scrimber ran into several technical problems because it failed to adopt an industrial process to it’s production cycle. “These include preparing the wood, crushing it, scrimming it, drying it, blending it with the glue, and finishing it.” Adding that there were major problems with crushing – which lead to very uneven strand diameters – caused issues with drying and the high-frequency press.
But that was the past, and this is now: “We are looking at European spruce, but we are open to any other species,” said Dr Franke. We know that plantation wood is coming and growing quickly, which presents an opportunity,” for example Japanese cedar or perhaps even radiata pine.
But one thing is sure: the world is now ready to scrimber!
Asked if scrimber was 30, 40 or even 50 years ahead of its time, Dr Bettina Franke said, “It was maybe also too early for architects. They didn’t know how to use it. There was no mass timber movement as we have today. Of the things happening around the world, the climate change drives us all to reduce carbon emission and instead rise carbon sequestration and storage in timber. On the other hand we have to consider the other resources, like for example urban tree-cutoffs as well as additionalsite resources which we are not allowed to cut. And this is the way. And now we notice and want to go one step ahead for the next generation.”
- To learn more about Scrimber technology, click here for Wood Central Senior Editor Jim Bowden’s exclusive article from July 7, 1985 and to learn more about the new start-up company and association, visit scrimber.com and scrimber.org – the “training camp for more information.”
