Engineered wood products carry just 3 to 5 per cent of the embodied carbon of primary steel in structural beam applications, even before the biogenic carbon stored within the wood is counted. That is according to Sam Burdett, Mohit Arora, and Rupert J. Myers of Imperial College London, whose open-access study in Springer Nature’s npj Materials Sustainability reviewed 204 emerging structural materials and found the construction sector’s lowest-carbon candidates missing from the major design databases that architects and engineers rely on.
The study, the first to unify material property and embodied carbon data for emerging structural materials, found that only 18 per cent of those reviewed had documented embodied carbon values. It comes as major databases remain out of step with commercial practice, with Ansys® Granta EduPack listing only glulam as its sole engineered wood entry as of December 2022, despite CLT, dowel laminated timber, structural composite timber, and bamboo glulam all being commercially available.
Reused steel delivered the deepest single cut in the beam case study, achieving a 97 per cent reduction against conventional structural steel, with timber CLT and glulam close behind. And bamboo glulam, a grass-based engineered hybrid increasingly gaining traction as an alternative to timber in regions where plantation softwood is scarce, performed at a comparable level to the best-performing wood products.
Bamboo glulam’s results are consistent with a separate Australian study showing that Asper bamboo achieves net-negative emissions in structural beam applications under local conditions, with lead author Daniel Milling from the University of Wollongong finding that no comparable cradle-to-grave analysis had previously been completed for the Australian context. The Nature paper’s authors note that bamboo glulam’s mechanical properties match conventional glulam across a range of beam and column applications, supporting the case for its broader inclusion alongside engineered wood products in material databases.
The research was co-authored by Burdett across his dual roles at Imperial College London and contractor Skanska UK, and the team found that timber’s low density places structural sections at 60 to 95 per cent below equivalent concrete and steel by mass. “The database developed in this study can help material innovators, designers, and developers to make effective material choices,” the authors note.
Of the 106 billion tonnes of materials extracted from Earth in 2024, nearly four times the 1970 volume, the construction sector consumed approximately half by mass. And whilst operational emissions are falling as grids decarbonise, embodied emissions now account for more than two-thirds of whole-life-cycle carbon in newly constructed buildings, with structural elements the single largest contributor.
The paper cites California’s AB-2446, the embodied carbon bill, and Denmark’s mandatory life-cycle assessments for buildings over 1,000 square metres as markers of a global regulatory shift that makes accurate material data a design prerequisite. The study, co-led by Rupert J. Myers at Imperial College London’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, found that primary steel recorded the highest embodied carbon in the beam case study, with engineered wood products and reused steel achieving cuts of up to 97 per cent.
For further information: Burdett, S., Arora, M. & Myers, R.J. Sustainable materials selection with emerging structural materials. npj Mater. Sustain. 4, 13 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44296-026-00099-7.
