A specialist timber engineering company, active throughout East Anglia and the Home Counties, is making extensive use of West Fraser’s SterlingOSB Zero in the production of its diverse offering of high performance, sustainable offsite solutions.
Based in the village of Gamlingay on the Cambridgeshire-Bedfordshire border, Pinewood Structures was established in 1981 and has grown steadily to become one of the UK’s foremost suppliers of timber-based systems across a variety of sectors, including housing and retirement developments, hotels and student living. The selection of site-specific solutions includes both open panel timber frame and ‘NHBC Accepted’ status factory insulated closed panels as well as floor and roof cassettes.
The Sales and Marketing Manager for Pinewood Structures, Peter Keogh, commented: “Over the past 15 years we have successfully completed over 600 separate schemes encompassing not only residential and student accommodation, but also hotels, supermarkets and other types of development. We manufacture our offsite timber frame solutions at our two purpose-designed factory units in Gamlingay, which provide us with 40,000 square feet of production space.
“Importantly, although numbers for the housebuilding industry remain flat, timber frame is steadily growing its market share, and we confidently expect to increase our total capacity from the current figure of approximately 1500 units per year: partly due to the fact we work a lot in affordable housebuilding which is being quite strongly supported by the Government. We are also working with registered providers and developers targeting the buy-to-rent market who favour a quick build method.”
Referencing the company’s commitments to being a sustainable supplier, Peter added: “In terms of our manufacturing, we primarily use the West Fraser 9mm Sterling OSB Zero as the sheathing to our open and closed panel systems; though it is also employed in other applications such as for fabricating floor cassettes for apartment buildings which will have an OSB deck onto which an acoustic floor system is installed. We also use CaberDek for some projects.
“Pinewood has long had a strong emphasis on the use of sustainably sourced materials, with the low embodied energy of timber having obvious attractions, which we need to prove to our customers through sustainable procurement. In addition, as a major manufacturer, we need a strong supply chain with West Fraser being a national supplier able to support us through reliability and quality. Overall, we are in a good place in the market and are excited about the future for timber frame and what timber products can do to help meet climate challenge.”
West Fraser, furthermore, ensures that all its lumber is sourced from responsibly managed forests, mainly in the UK, carrying full chain of custody meaning stocks are conserved by replanting and carefully planned cropping. While local sourcing reduces mileage, West Fraser is also investing heavily in a new rail head for its Inverness plant and buys only renewable electricity for the site – and has switched from gas power to biomass for its drying process. Across the group, ESG commitments are being delivered, and Inverness is on course to attain its 2030 targets next year.
All West Fraser panel products produced in the UK are net carbon negative and manufactured in mills that have obtained the coveted environmental ISO 14001 accreditation. Responsibly sourced, the panels are FSC® certified (C012533) and created from locally grown timber, cutting embodied carbon from transportation.
