Unused thinnings from Australia’s plantation forests could become the structural core of the country’s most cost-effective bio-based housing system. That is according to University of Queensland Associate Professor Joe Gattas, who is leading a new four-year project funded through the University of the Sunshine Coast’s Australian Forest and Wood Innovations (AFWI) Centre for Sustainable Futures, developing prefabricated small-footprint dwellings from forestry by-products that have nowhere useful to go.
It follows work that, as Wood Central reported, produced a prototype disaster-recovery house built almost entirely from bio-based materials — including structural cardboard-core sandwich panels — for $12,000, before subsequent testing refined the system further for disaster-zone deployment. Cardboard proved its temporary structural capacity, but moisture exposure limited its long-term use.
“The previous one was actually trying, for us, to test the lower bound of wood fibre quality — and we built the house with cardboard as the central structural component,” Gattas said. “It turned out that with cardboard, we made a full structural composite that was already better than foam core systems. But there were some broader building performance requirements, in particular durability after exposure to moisture, that cardboard wasn’t suited to.”
The answer could be cheaper than cardboard, too.
“We looked around and found there are many lower-value, out-of-grade structural wood products that are actually cheaper than cardboard — in particular, out-of-grade pine,” Gattas said. “That’s the new constituent component within the sandwich panel. So that makes an entirely wood-fibre system that uses a resource available through Australia’s softwood sawmills. So, we think this will allow the new system to have greater adaptability to different regions up and down the East Coast.”
The project will develop two construction systems in parallel: the bio-based sandwich panel and a roundwood framing system using small-diameter logs with minimal processing. Both target a segment the research team sees as chronically underserved — secondary dwellings, tiny homes, granny flats, sheds, carports, and hybrid “liveable sheds” combining utility space with habitable floor area.
As it stands, more than 10,500 secondary dwellings are estimated to be built each year nationally. And under conservative adoption scenarios, the new systems could generate demand for 61,000 cubic metres of timber fibre every year — creating a $57 million market opportunity — whilst supporting regional economies and avoiding displacement of existing timber markets. The systems are designed for off-site prefabrication or DIY flat-pack assembly, and for rapid deployment in disaster-affected and remote communities.
One of the project’s distinguishing ambitions is bridging the utilisation gap between hardwood and softwood supply chains — a problem Gattas describes as fundamentally different on each side of the ledger. “We’re really excited to try to bridge the hardwood and softwood utilisation question because they’re significantly different drivers and constraints for how much building product we can produce across those two domains,” Gattas said.
“Hurford’s and Weathertex have fantastic existing products that they can scale and deliver with current hardwood plantation resources — but the market doesn’t uptake those to their full capacity, as compared with softwood systems, which are already dominant. On the softwood side, the question is: what by-products aren’t ending up in construction? Trying to put all those things together into an intelligent construction system that suits this new market of secondary dwellings — that’s really what the project is about.”
Wood Central understands that leading timber wholesaler Hurford’s is the project’s proponent and has been working with Professor Gattas for several years. Speaking about the project, Andrew Hurford said it is a win-win for the hardwood supply chain on the mid north coast: “Hurford’s are very happy to be involved in the project. It just cuts across so many areas of interest for us, which is the utilisation of hardwood plantation timbers, and not to mention, a worthy project where we’re trying to use bio-based materials,” Hurford said.
“A lot of this current emergency housing is based on polystyrene and other things, and the houses only have a relatively short life. With a bio-based product, it’s a lot easier to repurpose or reutilise that material in a much more environmentally friendly manner.”
Dr Fabiano Ximenes has been part of this program since the prototype. The NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development Senior Research Scientist leads the bioproducts stream of the NSW Decarbonisation Innovation Hub — and it was his carbon framing that helped the earlier project attract national attention.
“My interest around that was around the decarbonisation opportunities for the concept — if that was to be rolled out more broadly in the event of emergencies, what would be the carbon implications of using local bio-based materials versus one of the key options now, which is basically steel-based kit systems coming from China,” Ximenes said. “That was the genesis of that project, which was highly successful and got a lot of media, a lot of attention. And then that became the platform for the much bigger, much broader AFWI-funded project that we are now supporting.”
The new work, he said, is an opportunity to stress-test that carbon case across different configurations and designs, rather than rely on estimates from a single prototype. At scale, the systems are modelled to store approximately 50,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually.
Professor Mark Brown, Director of the AFWI Centre for Sustainable Futures, said the project is exactly the kind of innovation the centre exists to back: “It aligns directly with our focus on maximising value from existing resources, developing new timber products, and supporting a more sustainable, carbon-friendly building sector,” he said.
AFWI is a national research and innovation institute valued at up to $200 million, backed by a $100 million Commonwealth investment. Wood Central understands that prototype testing will run across multiple Queensland and New South Wales sites over the coming years. To learn more about the project, visit its dedicated AFWI page.
