Reporter for The Canyon Weekly
Freres Engineered Wood has debuted a new wood storage warehouse at its Mill City campus that reduces the carbon footprint that would have been in place if other materials had been used.
The 58,000-square foot facility was built using the company’s mass plywood panels and Douglas fir veneer and will be used to store its panels and other wood products.
“As it is now, you only have two opportunities for warehouses: concrete tilt-up construction or pre-engineered metal buildings,” said Tyler Freres, the company’s VP of sales in a statement released by the company. “There’s been a lot of exploration to see if wood can provide a viable alternative to these methods, and the new mass timber warehouse demonstrates that wood can offer a quicker and more effective means of constructing large format warehouses.”
The new 60,000-square-foot mass timber warehouse mimics tilt-up concrete construction, but the structural elements are entirely Freres Engineered Wood’s patented mass plywood panels (MPP) and mass plywood lams (MPL). MPLs are used for heavy beams and columns. The building features a specific 40 feet by 48 feet grid, with space for four truck loading stations, two tarping stations and storage for 5,000 units of plywood.
“The main goal for this building is to house our expanded product line, but also to hold more inventory on site and allow us more consistent production runs,” Freres said.
“Most mass timber projects are built on a much smaller grid and don’t have this type of open floor space, so getting this span built in with the structure is unique,” Freres said.
Because the warehouse is built using sustainable forest products Freres officials estimate that the use of wood rather than concrete or metal is the equivalent of keeping 325 cars off the road for a year or saving the amount of energy that would operate 163 homes.
Freres, which has been in business for more than 100 years, is the largest company in the Santiam Canyon with approximately 500 employees and six plants, five in Lyons and one in Mill City.
