Athena Sustainable Materials Institute – $151,184

  • Create the technical infrastructure for reliable benchmarking of whole-building life-cycle assessment results that will allow low-carbon designs to much more credibly demonstrate their quantified benefits over business-as-usual.

Affine Climate Solutions Society – $153,287

  • Integrate the value of high-performance mass timber into underwriting processes, Phase 3, by developing the Vancity financing pilots into official lending programs.
  • Reach out to other financial institutions to initiate similar new processes with them.
BC Wood Specialties Group logo

BC Wood Specialties Group – $599,076

  • Educate and train architects, engineers, interior designers and construction professionals on mass timber and other B.C. value-added wood products and their applications through a variety of educational events, such as lunch-and-learn sessions, group seminars and factory tours.
  • Promote wood building products and systems, as well as the benefits of wood in construction and design, with value-added forest product companies at trade events.
  • Increase competitiveness, innovation and adaptability of individual value-added wood companies by improving their marketing and business development capability through assessments, site visits, workshops and business development projects.
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British Columbia Institute of Technology – $26,400

  • Support the development of skilled labour in low carbon building design and construction through course content development for the Advanced Skills in Whole-Building Life Cycle Assessment and the Embodied Carbon Emissions of the Built Environment micro credential for LCA design professionals.

Building Transformations (CanBIM Inc.) – $13,200

  • Advance the role of BIM (Building Information Modeling) in the permitting process to drive the uptake of prefabricated building systems.
  • Support and enhance knowledge and experience of local governments to work with BIM.

Canadian Wood Council – $560,633

  • Provide technical support and advice to address wood and mass timber performance attributes in multi-family, multi-storey and non-residential projects.
  • Convey practical wood design solutions through educational events.
  • Communicate sound wood construction practices.
  • Support building and fire code changes that allow for increased wood and mass timber use.
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Carleton University – $52,085

  • Demonstrate the 2 h fire-resistance of an unprotected nail laminated timber floor through applied research.
  • Give designers the confidence to specify exposed mechanically laminated timber floors in buildings that require a 2 h fire resistance.
Construction Foundation of BC logo

Construction Foundation of BC – $193,996

  • Leverage the best practices and course content developed through the Skills Ready and Indigenous Skills initiatives to create space for young people to connect through hands-on learning, while engaging Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth, educators and industry to learn about B.C. wood products, with an emphasis on innovations in wood engineering and manufacturing.
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FPInnovations – $134,257

  • Compile the background information for validation of preliminary creep factors for mass timber-concrete composite made with products of Canadian species.
  • Develop an approach for conducting small-scale and/or full-scale testing of mass timber-concrete composite systems for floors.
  • Quantify the performance of mass timber diaphragms in tall hybrid buildings subjected to lateral (seismic and wind) loads.
  • Compare the economic and environmental metrics of a regular wood-frame building with a building designed for disassembly to support prefabrication and low-carbon construction.

National Research Council of Canada – $48,350

  • Develop transparent intumescent coating to ensure that fire resistance rating requirements are met while reducing the need for encapsulation in mass timber buildings, resulting in increased overall aesthetics provided by timber, Phase 2.
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Simon Fraser University – $154,000

  • Mobilize and refine land use policy and permitting solutions for the construction of prefabricated, mass timber low- and mid-rise buildings with key constituencies through diverse media to inform and solicit feedback to strengthen solutions.

Thompson Rivers University – $47,740

  • Develop ductile lateral load resisting systems for mass timber construction with ductility comparable to or better than ductile moment frames and shear walls built with concrete or steel.
University of British Columbia – Okanagan logo

University of British Columbia—Okanagan – $77,000

  • Develop two innovative timber buildings systems using CLT core and glulam frame for heights up to 20 storeys suitable for mass-scale construction without compromising the building performance against even extreme seismic events.
University of British Columbia – Okanagan logo

University of British Columbia—Centre for Advanced Wood Processing – $500,720

  • Deliver educational programs to explore and convey advanced wood processing solutions, such as industrial robotics, mixed reality wood fabrication, and prefabrication in wood and mass timber assemblies.
  • Organize a B.C. tour to visit prominent mass-timber and prefabricated building system manufacturers.
  • Design, engineer, prototype, test and conduct cost-benefit analyses to support value-added manufacturers in the development of new wood products.
  • Maintain and grow an online platform and organize a series of networking meetings to foster collaboration between manufacturers and industrial designers in various subsectors of the value-added wood industry.
  • Research:
    • Analyze the vibration response of a hybrid floor system in which CLT panels are combined with steel beams using self-tapping screws for a modular prefabricated dry assembly mass timber-steel hybrid floor element, Phase 2.
    • Develop an advanced multi-material hybrid shear connector for mass timber buildings that allow for easy construction, deconstruction, and reuse of the structural elements , Phase 3.
    • Develop a new mass timber system, Engineered Nail Laminated Timber (ENLT), for wall and floor applications by creating an internal mechanism for lateral resistance.
    • Develop design values for glulam made from western hemlock and mixed species of western hemlock and Amabilis fir (hem-fir) for Canadian wood design standards CSA 0122 and 086.
    • Develop sustainable, high-performance, and safe-to-use thermal insulating materials for buildings by converting tree-harvesting waste and/or low-value wood industry by-products into lignocellulosic nanofibre.
    • Develop all natural, self-bonded bark exterior building cladding products for conventional and tall wood buildings.
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University of Northern British Columbia logo

University of Northern British Columbia – $200,105

  • Research:
    • Investigate the performance of recently developed high-performance CLT shear wall connections when tested in multi-storey platform-type construction.
    • Develop point-supported CLT floor systems to a larger grid and reduce the material costs of a mass timber building project.
    • Address the design challenges in controlling human-induced vibration of mass timber floors and support the development of vibration design guidance for mass timber floor systems.
    • Develop a dynamic modelling method for the vibration design of tall mass-timber buildings.
    • Investigate the fire performance of archetypical tall timber buildings with mass timber cores after the occurrence of a design-level seismic event.
    • Examine the applicability of proposed structural connections in tall timber buildings and develop design recommendations for buildings located in seismic areas such as Victoria and Vancouver.
    • Investigate the feasibility of vacuum press technology for small and mid-sized BC companies to manufacture mass-timber panels.
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University of Victoria logo

University of Victoria – $135,520

  • Research:
    • Understand the seismic performance of hybrid building systems, in which a light wood frame structure is structurally attached to a mass timber core with a ductile connection system, Phase 2
    • Develop high-capacity shear walls with multi-row of nails for mid-rise wood frame buildings.
    • Develop knowledge-based guidelines for enhancing the capacity of shear walls with high safety margins for 5- to 6-storey wood-frame buildings in the context of current CSA O86 standard.
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zebx logo

Zero Emissions Building Exchange (ZEBx) – $176,220

  • Support the creation of an Embodied Emissions Centre of Excellence (EECoE) that will support raising awareness of embodied emissions and to build capacity for cost-effective construction with low-carbon materials.
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For an overview of our recipient projects completed in 2021/22, please download our Year in Review.

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