Structurlam’s Conway Facility Ready to Log In

Hardy Wentzel is pleasantly surprised that Structurlam Mass Timber Corp. is ready to open for business in Conway the first week of June as scheduled.

During the last year, Wentzel, the CEO of the Canadian company, has watched with bated breath as construction continued at the former Nucor Fastener plant. Structurlam announced the $90 million project to open a mass timber production facility in December 2019.

But then came a deadly pandemic, economic upheaval in England and the blockage of a major shipping canal in Africa. And in February, Arkansas saw a massive winter storm that dumped 10 inches of snow on Conway.

“Can you believe that?” Wentzel asked about the facility opening on time. “I’m happy to report it.”

The plant already has business lined up, too. Structurlam will provide 1.7 million cubic feet of mass timber to build Walmart Inc.’s new 2.4-million SF home office, situated on 350 acres in Bentonville. Wentzel said Walmart will absorb approximately one-third of the production capacity of Structurlam’s 288,000-SF facility.

Structurlam will eventually employ 130 in Conway to build a variety of mass timber products, the most notable of which is cross-laminated timber. CLT, as it is commonly known, is a building material made of stacked planks of wood that is strong yet lightweight.

CLT has been growing in popularity in Europe and is beginning to make inroads in the United States. Its place in Arkansas is no accident. Peter MacKeith, the dean of the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, has been a vocal proponent for years after becoming familiar with CLT while working in Finland.

It was MacKeith’s influence that resulted in several buildings on the Fayetteville campus being built with CLT. The most prominent is the $79.6 million Adohi Hall dormitory.

The university’s use of CLT attracted Walmart’s attention, as did the fact that CLT would be a sustainable outlet for the state’s forestry industry. The wood that Structurlam will turn into mass timber products will be cut from Arkansas forests.

“It really is a big deal,” said state Commerce Secretary Mike Preston. “It is such a great Arkansas story. It is a really cool story for Arkansas.”

Full Speed Ahead

Securing Walmart as its first major customer was obviously a boon for Structurlam, but Wentzel said the Conway facility was designed for the long term.

The production capacity will be twice what the company can produce at its plant in Penticton, British Columbia. Wentzel said the plant is set up to take advantage of what he predicts will be a growth industry in two years, after the Walmart order is filled.

“We went in with a very thoughtful design and how we wanted to — post-Walmart Home Office in two years — serve the Southern U.S. marketplace,” Wentzel said. “We built the most state-of-the-art mass timber plant in the world, once it is running. We built a very, very capable mass timber plant.”

The decision to locate in Arkansas wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment choice, either. The advantages of being in Arkansas are logistical: The state has an overabundance of the raw material in its forests and its south-central location situates it perfectly for distribution.

(Structurlam is actually not the first CLT production facility in Arkansas. Texas CLT has a plant in Magnolia, which in December achieved American Lumber Standard Committee certification to produce mass timber products for commercial use.)

“The wood basket in Arkansas is a fantastic wood basket with more than enough lumber production,” Wentzel said. “Arkansas has a fantastic wood basket of southern pine, and we intend to use a whole bunch of that without depleting the forest by any stretch of the imagination. We are really a value adder instead of a pure commodity producer.”

Matthew Pelkki, the Clippert Endowed Chair of Forestry at the College of Forestry, Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Arkansas at Monticello, said Arkansas’ location puts it at the hub of a potential distribution network.

“Arkansas has some real advantages to reach a big chunk of the country with this type of material because we have the pine resources and we are closer,” Pelkki said, mentioning other timber states in the Southeastern United States. “There is a lot of market availability we are going to have.”

The Future Is Wood

Pelkki is excited about Structurlam’s facility and the spotlight that projects such as Walmart’s Home Office and UA’s Adohi Hall will shine on the use of wood as a building material. Pelkki said mass timber can be an economic driver for the forest industry in Arkansas and also help in the proper management of the resource.

The state harvested 22 million tons of timber last year, a 10% decrease from the year before. Pelkki expects up to 25 million tons will be harvested this year, which seems like a lot but doesn’t make much of a dent in Arkansas’ total timber supply.

Arkansas has 1.2 billion tons of standing wood, which Pelkki said will grow by as much as 45 million tons this year, nearly twice the expected harvest rate. That glut is what makes the mass timber industry so appealing for Arkansas.

“Cutting our way out of this is going to be a challenge,” Pelkki said. “It is a really good situation for the industry to come in because long-term prices are not likely to skyrocket.”

Wentzel said that even with Walmart’s 1.1 million cubic SF order, Structurlam won’t have a negative impact on Arkansas’ forests.

“The volumes that we consume will be very much within the realm of reasonableness for the wood basket of Arkansas,” Wentzel said. “It keeps growing and growing and growing. Our demand on the wood basket will not disrupt any supply that currently exists. We will be a healthy consumer but not at a scale to disrupt the supply chain.”

The hope is that as CLT becomes better known, more commercial and residential buildings will then use the product, raising demand.

“It is a new technology and a new way of building that Arkansas is taking a lead on,” Preston said. “We are at the forefront of this technology and having a successful project here and a successful completion of Walmart’s new corporate headquarters is going to prove to the country and the world what a great technology this is.”

Wood, of course, is renewable. Pelkki said modern trees grow twice as fast as those planted 30 years ago, and more thorough thinning will make forests healthier and more productive.