The largest construction companies in the Netherlands are preparing to build more houses from wood. BAM is working on a factory that will produce a thousand wooden homes per year from 2025; Heijmans also wants to expand the number of houses built with wood.
Dura Vermeer opened a production line in Enschede that produces wooden residential modules and Ballast Nedam will start building 126 homes in Amsterdam in about a year, some of which will be used with sustainable materials, including wood. And there’s more to come, the company says. “The new form of building is about to take off.”
According to the construction industry, it is necessary to build more with wood to achieve the climate goals. “During the production of concrete and cement, an insane amount of CO2 is released, about 7 percent of global emissions come from cement production,” says TU Delft researcher Pablo van der Lugt. “Wood stores CO2 during growth and that remains fixed during use. And during production there are much less emissions than with concrete.”
House from the factory
There are already small-scale projects in the Netherlands where houses are largely made of wood. Startblock has a factory in Emmeloord. This week, four ready-made houses were driven from the factory to Ridderkerk. They only have to be placed in the right place and connected to the sewage system, the water supply and the electricity network. Eventually there will be 32 houses.
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