USAA Real Estate and Seefried Industrial Properties are nearing completion of a 161,000 square foot industrial building in the 157-acre Southfield Park 35 in Dallas that will be one of the first industrial warehouses built with sustainable building materials to reduce its carbon impact by more than 45%.

Scheduled for delivery in June, the building is constructed with cross-laminated timber, a precision-engineered wood product that replaces the sloped-wall concrete panels of a typical industrial warehouse. Conventional construction methods use concrete, which annually produces 8% of global carbon emissions. By using CLT instead of steel and concrete, the carbon-intensive construction process is cut almost in half. The developers said the 60ft CLT panels were sourced from a forest in British Columbia, Canada, which is tightly regulated by federal authorities who allow only 1% of available wood to be grown and require two trees to be planted for each that is harvested.

The cost of CLT is slightly higher than concrete. But according to Lange Allen, managing director of USAA Real Estate, the use of CLT in the warehouse project is in line with the company’s ambition to be more imaginative in limiting the environmental impact of its developments and take advantage of sustainably harvested renewable resources. Click to read more at www.gownleyappraisal.com.