As mass timber becomes an increasingly popular alternative to concrete and steel, a local family business is pushing the trend forward with its own plywood spinoff. Freres Lumber Co, based out of Lyons, creates a mass ply product that’s been used on several recent construction projects in Salem, including at the Union Gospel Mission and YMCA. The product created buzz when it was used to build the roof of the new Portland airport terminal that opened this year. Over 70% of the plywood Freres provided for the project was wood reclaimed from trees damaged in the Santiam Canyon wildfires in 2020. Freres’ mass ply product was used to build the roof of the new Portland Airport terminal that opened earlier this year (Rachel Alexander/Salem Reporter) Executives of CD Redding, a Salem construction company, said Freres’ mass ply has provided them a more efficient alternative to concrete, steel and other wood products.  The contractor has used Freres’ mass ply to build the roof structure of a chapel and bicycle shed at the Union Gospel Mission, the pavilion roof at Capitol Auto Group in north Salem and decking between the first and second floors at Johnson Family Orthodontics in south Salem. In the lobby of the YMCA, slices of the mass ply form the one-story wooden block that envelops the first story of the facility’s elevator. The building, finished in fall 2022, was another CD Redding project, with the elevator sponsored by the Freres family. CD Redding used Freres’ mass ply product to build the elevator shaft in the lobby of the Salem YMCA, which opened in fall 2022 (Ardeshir Tabrizian/Salem Reporter) Cory Redding, founder and president of CD Redding, said one reason his company uses the product is that wood is a renewable resource.  “The more they can sell of this product and mass produce it, the cheaper it’s going to get,” he said of Freres. If the Trump administration raises tariffs as promised – taxes paid by companies importing goods – importing steel from China will become more expensive. Redding said the availability of lumber in the Pacific Northwest will become even more beneficial.  Chad Elliot, owner of CD Redding, said that previous supply chain issues have improved, but two years ago, they had to wait 12 to 16 months for suppliers to send certain steel products that could be used instead of mass ply. Not only is the Freres product local, he said, but they can also “produce that product much quicker, and they’re not backed up for a year.” Compared with most other mass timber products, mass ply allows builders to do more with less, according to Kyle Freres, the company’s vice president of operations. Instead of sawing thick, rectangular boards out of trees, the company peels off thin wood slices called “veneers.”  The slices are rapidly glued together into larger pieces by machines that have been programmed to follow building designs.  “It’s a one-of-a-kind product,” he said. “We can have a lot more flexibility about how we can work that veneer to make some truly large and impressive panels and columns and beams.” Elliot said mass ply is lighter and stronger than its counterparts on the mass timber market, and its flexibility makes it easier to shape.  He recalled previously working on a sawmill and figuring out what pieces could be removed. “There was so much waste,” he said. Veneer, he said, can make use of almost the entire tree and can also be made from smaller trees. A new alternative The lumber company was founded in 1922 by Freres’ grandfather, T.G. Freres. It currently employs around 420 people including production workers, millwrights, diesel mechanics and truck drivers. They started using mass ply in 2017. After hearing about mass timber, Freres executives wanted to develop a veneer-based product that comes from Douglas fir trees.  The company continues to produce its previous products of veneer, plywood, chips and bark dust. Mass ply is currently a small percentage of its overall business, Freres said, “but we believe it will be a growth market going forward.” Company executives say the product has a much lower carbon footprint and allows for quicker construction than concrete and steel. “Concrete and steel take many, many times the amount of energy to produce than wood products,” Freres said. At Freres Lumber Co’s Lyons facility, logs are run through a series of machines and sliced into pieces of veneer to be used in the company’s mass ply product on Nov. 7, 2024 (Ardeshir Tabrizian/Salem Reporter) The company’s sales since producing mass ply have been generally positive until this year, according to Freres. He said sales have been “a mixed bag” due to a roller coaster of economic conditions since Covid, such as high interest rates, reduced wood fiber supply and competition from imports. Starting in 2021, he said their sales revenue almost doubled each year until 2024. Freres hopes to see more growth in the company’s sales and in the mass timber market. Other developers have recently used Freres’ product to build the roof and floor panels of the new Salem Public Works building, as well as floor panels at Chemeketa Community College’s Agricultural Complex. The wood is sliced at the Freres’ plywood plant in Lyons, then transported three miles over to its Mill City facility to be glued together. “They’re engineered so you know how they’re going to perform,” Freres said. Redding said it’s difficult to build openings into metal or concrete. When using mass ply, he said, they can engineer the exact size of an HVAC duct or doorway.  That woodwork is also done in a shop instead of at a construction site, where the job would be much more labor-intensive. Freres said that while design takes longer when developing buildings made of mass timber, construction — the expensive part — gets done much faster, which drives down building costs. One challenge of using mass timber is that builders need to have equipment available to move and install it. Young engineers coming out of college have also been taught to design with concrete and steel instead of wood, according to Freres. “It does pull people out of their comfort zone,” he said. Freres said the designs on mass timber construction also need to be locked down early on in the development process.  “You can’t be making changes at the 11th hour,” he said. “People are used to making changes until the last nail is in the building. You just can’t do that.” Kyle Freres, vice president of operations at Freres Lumber Co., stands beside stacks of veneer at the company’s mass ply facility in Lyons on Nov. 7, 2024 (Ardeshir Tabrizian/Salem Reporter) Freres said the speed of building with mass ply makes it ideal for warehouses and multi-family apartment complexes. He hopes the product will help build affordable housing where it’s needed in Salem and elsewhere. Multi-family complexes, Freres said, often have as many as 18 stories. “You get a lot of repeatability when you start stacking floors on top of each other,” he said. Elliot said the heaviness of concrete requires more truck loads than wood does to get materials to a construction site. “The lighter the building, the lighter everything underneath it has to be,” according to Eric Boman, business development manager at CD Redding. “You wouldn’t believe it’s lighter when you try to pick up a piece of this stuff.” The contractor’s largest use of mass ply was in building Freres’ new plywood storage building, built entirely out of the product.  The 58,000-square-foot building was completed in September in under six weeks. That’s faster than it took to excavate the site and fill the ground with concrete, Freres said.  Elliot said they built the warehouse at least two months faster and spent less than they would have if they’d used concrete instead. Freres said that environmental benefits are another reason he expects the mass timber market to continue to grow.  Trees absorb carbon as they grow, a process called sequestration. When a tree is processed into a wood product, “that carbon is essentially sequestered for the lifetime of that building,” he said. The amount of carbon stored in wood and greenhouse gas emissions avoided in the recent plywood warehouse project was equivalent to around 325 fewer cars on the road for a year, according to company data.  Freres said the types of trees they get their wood from are the same ones typically removed to reduce the risk of wildfires. When building with veneers, defects such as knots or broken limbs often seen in older trees are randomized through the wood panels, which minimizes their effect on the product’s performance, according to Freres. “We really believe in forest management, utilizing our natural resources in an intelligent fashion to reduce the chance of wildfire out there, and at the same time produce some really beneficial renewable products for the construction industry,” Freres said. It’s a win-win for the Oregon economy.” Contact reporter Ardeshir Tabrizian: [email protected] or 503-929-3053. A MOMENT MORE, PLEASE– If you found this story useful, consider subscribing to Salem Reporter if you don’t already. Work such as this, done by local professionals, depends on community support from subscribers. Please take a moment and sign up now – easy and secure: SUBSCRIBE. The post Santiam Canyon wood product gives Salem developers an efficient alternative to concrete, steel appeared first on Salem Reporter.