• The wood obtained from the 1,500 poplars of Fuente Vaqueros will be used to manufacture laminated beams and to carry out resistance tests to obtain the certification of the European Committee for Standardization for structural elements.
• The project, with the participation of the University and the Provincial Council, offers an ecological solution to pollution in the Metropolitan Area and boosts rural economic development with the creation of a wood industry in great demand.

The LIFE Wood for Future/Madera para el Futuro project, which has obtained funding from the LIFE Program of the European Union [LIFE 20 CCA/ES/001656], this week promotes the cutting of a poplar grove in Fuente Vaqueros, whose wood will be used to build a demonstration building in Granada with structural elements of poplar laminated timber, the first of its kind in Spain. The farm will be included in the project to return to poplar trees under sustainable forest management.

LIFE Wood for Future is a project of the University of Granada, the Provincial Council, the Confederation of Forestry Organizations of Spain, the University of Santiago de Compostela and the spinoff 3edata, which has proposed to the Granada institutions to collaborate in a shock plan to recover the poplar groves of the Vega as an effective tool in the fight against air pollution in the Metropolitan Area of Granada.

The ‘Populus’ crops, a fast-growing species, absorb a large amount of CO2 and polluting gases from urban traffic and create a cooler and more humid microclimate. “All the biomass of this poplar tree represents a fixation of 440 tons of carbon, equivalent to the emissions of about 200 cars over a year (11,000 km each),” explains Antolino Gallego, professor of Applied Physics at the School of Building Engineering and coordinator of the project.

If wood is also used in the construction sector, it not only fixes CO2, but also avoids the use of other raw materials with a huge carbon footprint. In this case, the mass of timber, some 1,000 cubic meters, means fixing some 300 tons of CO2 (negative carbon footprint) over several decades; if concrete were used, 300 tons would be emitted into the atmosphere, and if steel were used, 280 tons would be emitted. These calculations, says Gallego, are based on existing literature, but the Institute for Agricultural and Fisheries Research and Training (Ifapa) of the Andalusian Government is conducting experiments to refine these values, so that foresters in the Vega de Granada can officially enter the market for the sale of carbon credits to obtain additional income from their crops.

The poplar wood demonstration building will be built in the province of Granada, at a site yet to be determined. The Bonsai Arquitectos studio, also responsible for the first cross-laminated timber building (in this case spruce, similar to fir) erected in Granada, an apartment block on Cuenca Street, is working on the preliminary project. It will use laminated poplar beams up to six meters long.

Of the 1,500 poplars in the Fuente Vaqueros plot, apart from their construction use, part will be used for tests to obtain certification from the European Committee for Standardization, a process that will take about five years and will provide a certificate of quality and resistance to poplar wood, both from the Vega de Granada (‘P. euramericana’, clone MC), and from Castilla León and Valle del Ebro). France and Germany already have this certification.

Another part of the wood will be used to manufacture plywood for fruit crates, the traditional use of this wood in the region. The rest (branches and leaves) will be shredded to make chipboard, used as biomass fuel or thrown on the ground of the poplar grove itself as organic fertilizer.

Once the cutting is finished, which will last several days, the owner of this land adheres to the LIFE project, which implies complying with the conditions of sustainable cultivation, using certified plants and increasing the distance between trees and the frequency of watering and pruning (which results in thicker trunks with fewer knots that are more valuable on the market).

In Granada, 75% of the poplar groves have been lost in the last twenty years and currently only 3,000 hectares remain, most of them in the Vega. The researchers and technicians of LIFE Wood for the Future believe that the recovery of poplar groves could radically reverse the serious air pollution problem that afflicts Granada, the third city in Spain with the worst air quality. Eighty percent of the pollution in the Granada Metropolitan Area comes from road traffic, and the climate and orography exacerbate the concentration of gases that are harmful to human health and contribute to global warming.

The LIFE Wood for the Future project will involve a significant investment over four years – 55% contributed by the European Union and the rest by the Spanish partners – which will be devoted to the promotion of a union of populiculturists – to whom certified seedlings and care will be provided -, the promotion of a wood processing industry and research into new materials for sustainable construction in the laboratories of the universities of Granada and Santiago de Compostela. In addition, the restoration of riverbanks with poplars and other native species in riverbeds of the Vega de Granada is planned.