Originally published by Amanada Abrams for UrbanLand Magazine.

“I get the question a lot: ‘Oh, mass timber—that’s a West Coast thing, right?’” said Jessica Scarlett, regional director for Woodworks, at the 2023 ULI Carolinas Meeting in February. “But it’s not just a West Coast trend anymore.”

Scarlett was discussing the growth in popularity of mass timber, a construction style that uses engineered wood panels to form a building’s structural system. While it originated in Europe in the 1990s, the method quickly spread through Canada and the Pacific Northwest, mass timber has grown in popularity all over the United States.

One reason is its sustainability. Conventional building materials like concrete and steel account for 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions globally. Meanwhile, mass timber—from the sustainably-managed forests where the wood is grown to the end product which locks up CO2 for its entire lifetime—has a much more favorable carbon footprint.