Sandra Lupien
On closing the gaps and removing the barriers to mass timber
Sandra Lupien is the Director of MassTimber@MSU and Interim Director of the Forest Carbon and Climate Program at Michigan State University. She is currently using her experience in public policy to remove the barriers to mass timber growth and train the next generation of technicians — becoming an industry leader in the timber revolution. Eight years ago, she caught the mass timber bug when an insatiable beetle was sweeping through California’s forests.
While Sandra was a graduate student studying public policy at Berkeley, a bark beetle infestation was killing hundreds of millions of pines across the West. Sandra took notice of the problem and the looming environmental threat. A wave of dead trees posed a statewide wildfire risk not only as kindling for new fires but fuel for existing ones — helping push flames up into the vulnerable canopies of fire-resistant trees. Even those that didn’t burn would quickly decompose. Both paths would lead to massive carbon emissions in the near future. To reduce these risks, this wood needed to be taken out of the forest and put to use. Sandra knew exactly what to use it for…furniture.
SapphirePine LLC, co-founded by Sandra, was a sustainability-focused furniture company built from the wood killed by beetles and droughts. Though it started as a fun solution to a timely problem, Sandra was soon thinking beyond tables and chairs. The idea of joining sustainable forestry with construction for mutual benefit could have a much bigger impact on much larger problems. She soon discovered mass timber and set out to make it.
After pivoting her company to developing mass timber from undervalued species, she used her thesis (“Removing Barriers to Cross-Laminated Timber Manufacture and Adoption in California: A game-changer for forests, wildfire, and climate”) to identify the barriers holding the industry back. In 2021, she was invited to continue researching mass timber at MSU, in her home state of Michigan. She has since become an international advocate for the industry. When we asked Sandra to talk about MassTimber@MSU’s early leadership, she mentioned a $650k NSF grant secured by her MSU colleagues George Berghorn and Linda Nubani and Chad Richert at Henry Ford College to develop groundbreaking mass timber design and construction curriculum
The CLT industry should be part of an ecological forest management plan—not the other way around.
The goal of the grant is to fill the workforce gap in mass timber — one of the industry’s most persistent barriers. “Mass timber is new to North America, and even newer to the Midwest,” said Lupien in response to the award. If we want more timber projects, then we need more people comfortable with its construction. This collaborative project strikes this issue at its core, aiming to prepare the next generation of technicians with timber expertise. Designed as modules, the coursework can be dropped into existing curriculum or operate on its own. The initiative is a collaborative effort within the school and between universities — a nationwide push to increase timber education and construction capacity. While the material covers the cutting-edge of construction, MSU is also pushing for innovative ways of teaching by tapping virtual reality.
Some lessons are best taught visually, and construction falls neatly into this category. While programs like MSU can use their full-scale construction models or new mass timber building (Michigan’s first) for instruction, others don’t have the resources. To address this, the curriculum development project will include virtual and augmented reality experience for mass timber construction education. At a time when the construction workforce shortage tops half a million, increasing access to quality education is essential. Sandra also wondered if VR might play a role in closing physical distance between cities and forests. With it, one could walk with a forester in the woods, visualize climate adaptations, and watch the forest progress on its own timescale — lowering another stubborn barrier in mass timber’s adoption.
In her thesis, Sandra reported that opposing perceptions of forest management were holding back mass timber in California — an urban/rural divide of forest understanding. While those in the woods saw firsthand the fire risk from unmanaged forests and encouraged responsible harvesting, many urbanites couldn’t see past the clear-cutting operations of California’s past. The idea that cutting trees can help forests, was counterintuitive.
This dissonance was hardly unique to California, nor is it any less prevalent in the Midwest today. When forest management and responsible harvesting is akin to deforestation, management is under-resourced. When only a handful of trees are valued in the marketplace, all others of small stature or imperfection are unable to pay their way out of the forest. While some may applaud this hands-off approach, they are often unaware that decades of deliberate fire suppression have starved many forests of their ritual cleaning agent — building up evermore fuel for the next blaze. When fires eventually break out, the Forest Service is forced to borrow more from its budget to fight the supercharged flames. Less is left for future management, and the trees continue to pile up instead of replacing conventional, carbon-intensive materials.
Building with mass timber is forcing us to confront difficult topics that contemporary construction too easily ignores. Deepening an ore mine is met with hardly as much animosity as sustainable harvesting in a state forest. Yet, forests can benefit from expert management and logging; it can even save them. Creating valuable forest products generates an economic incentive to not only manage our forests but to keep them as forests. Diverse and durable forest products support diverse and thriving forests — production shapes protection. Whether in a beam or a bench, lasting wood products lock-in carbon for decades or centuries, remove fuel from the forest, and protect the places from which they came — all in place of extractive, unequal, conventional practices. Humans need shelter, and that shelter will need raw materials, Sandra put bluntly. If we can design a mutually beneficial relationship with our material sources then we should. This will require a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the forest — a tall order in a world of sound bites and summaries — but Sandra is more than up for the task.
While Sandra is busy tackling policy in North America, she is also involved in mass timber internationally. MSU has an ongoing collaboration with Finland’s Natural Resources Institute, and this past May, MSU co-lead a workshop on climate solutions through bio-based products. Together, they discussed the role of forest products in climate solutions and forged collaborations across the entire value chain of timber — learning from Finland’s circular economic models. Sandra’s workshop focused on exploring the materials, designs, construction processes, and policies needed to create reusable timber products — giving every panel and beam the best chance at a “next life.”
We know mass timber has significant carbon storage benefits from the forest into the building and throughout the building's life. How can we extend those benefits to a next life for mass timber products?
Apart from the workshop, Sandra caught a glimpse of the manufacturing might behind Finland’s bio-economy. Massive sawmills with cutting-edge technology use each part of every tree cut from the country’s working forests. The United States lags behind the efficiency of Finland’s operations, but efforts are underway across North America to reduce waste and find evermore creative ways to direct material energy into buildings. Many of those initiatives can be found at MSU.
Sandra is weaving Michigan's tradition of forestry with its history of manufacturing excellence to elevate an industry with the potential to reduce emissions, create more value for forests, and address labor shortcomings in construction. Sandra is working on so much that no one summary can do her efforts justice. I hope this is only a starting point for further investigation into the incredible projects undertaken by her, her program(s), and her colleagues at MSU. From developing cleaner adhesives to closing the workforce gap and removing policy barriers, MassTimber@MSU and Sandra are making huge strides towards a timber future.
For those in Atlanta, Sandra will be speaking at the Advancing Mass Timber Construction conference in early September. Sign up for MassTimber@MSU’s newsletter here to stay up-to-date on all their people and projects.