(By Marcelo Bátiz) The wood sector is advancing in a consensus to specify “in the coming months” a voluntary wood certification system, a necessary step to promote construction with this product, in a process that already has an important development in various countries.
This was stated to Télam by Daniel Vier Zanelli, president of the Argentine Chamber of Wood Sawmills (Cadamda) and first vice president of the Argentine Federation of the Wood and Allied Industry (Faima), days after the meeting of businessmen, professionals and officials from the area in the technical meeting held at the National Directorate of Industrial Forestry Development.
Vier considered that the certification will “certainly” mean a boost to the construction activity with wood and emphasized that “it is an inexorable paradigm shift, it will come no matter what.”
“The world is building more and better with wood, with quality architecture and technical characteristics infinitely superior to other traditional ones,” he added.
“When it will happen, that will depend on us,” he pointed out, referring to the need not to miss out on the environmental and energy efficiency advantages that the activity shows in relation to traditional wet construction.
One of the main obstacles that construction with wood has to promote its development in the country is due to the lack of uniform regulations on certification or labeling.
“It’s been a long time, about 30 years, that in the timber sector we tried to develop a system so that the buyer knows what to look for and acquire, so that the product gives him the benefits that he expects by design, structure or calculation,” he said. Vier, who raised the difficulties “ranging from the cultural”.
In this sense, he maintained that “because of the closeness that we all have with wood, nobody wonders what its technical characteristics have to be; it never occurs to anyone to make a concrete beam without doing the calculations, but with wood it is believed that a beam has to endure, and that is not correct, because just as there is an exact calculation for an iron or concrete beam, there also has to be for wood”, he remarked.
“There is a classification that is very close to the subjective, something that does not happen with cement or another input for traditional construction,” he insisted, to complete by pointing out that the process that at some point will lead to uniform and mandatory regulations “is not a path easy, but there’s already a long way to go.
The lack of uniform regulations “is a problem, without a doubt,” he acknowledged, “especially for those who belong to the field of construction (architects, foremen, etc.), although for those of us who come from the world of wood is simpler”, due to the accumulation of “years of individual practices”.
These practices, he indicated, “we try to harmonize them in a regulation” especially to help the buyer, who when arriving at the counter of a corralón “does not know which product is the right one for what he needs and there begins to be a bid for prices before than for quality”.
“That is to the detriment of the product and perhaps the construction is not in good condition, but because the appropriate material was not used,” he explained.
Vier indicated that “there is a lot of nomenclature, literature and international regulations that can be a basis for the development of a national regulation”, although he warned that it cannot be an automatic translation “because the woods in Argentina have different characteristics from those of other countries” and even differences between different forest basins within the country.
A uniform regulation, he clarified, “does not depend only on the agreement between the participants of a certain productive chain but on the institutions that are dedicated to this task”, which in our country is the Argentine Institute for Standardization and Certification (IRAM).
The IRAM standards, Vier said, “take a long time, because there are many actors who have to work on them” and in the case of structural wood, there is an additional difficulty, which is the classification by species.
For this reason -and while the time for uniform and mandatory certification arrives- the voluntary regulations agreed between professionals and businessmen in the sector could be an intermediate step so as not to stop the progress of construction with wood and allow Argentina to develop this activity on a par with many other countries, taking advantage of the natural resources it possesses.
“We are committed to trying to get some type of seal or label that guarantees the quality and dimensions of the product, both for the architect and the builder or the consumer. It is something that is going to be resolved in the coming months, we just have to agree on it “, he anticipated.
Vier highlighted the role of Sabina Vetter since March of last year at the head of the National Forestry Industrial Development Directorate, in an area historically characterized “by difficulties in scheduling a work table, when the interlocutors change permanently.”
He pondered that Vetter “is a person who comes from the timber industry (he was the Bioenergy manager of the Lipsia timber company for twelve years) and knows the particular complexities of the sector, something that has given us a lot of encouragement to promote an active agenda.”
Source: Ambito
