José Manuel Iglesias, president of the Galician Wood and Design Cluster, shared his experience and invited interested businessmen and investors to get to know the Galician wood industry, which is mainly based on pine and eucalyptus. The cluster brings together more than 3,000 companies from the entire Galician wood chain -sawmills, beam, board, veneer and pulp mills, furniture and contract companies, pellets and biomass-, which last year had a turnover of almost 2,000 million euros and employed 18,000 people.

“If the 19th century was the century of steel and the 20th century was the century of concrete, experts agree that the 21st century is the century of wood,” said Iglesias, who highlighted its environmental properties – it is renewable, biodegradable and neutral in greenhouse gas emissions, the paradigm of the circular economy – as well as its potential to generate wealth and jobs in rural areas.

Iglesias stressed the importance of cooperation between entrepreneurs who, in the case of Galicia, has managed to attract the support of the regional administration and change the social image of the timber sector as a “predator” of the forest that was held a few years ago by a sector that creates jobs, sets population, contributes to combating climate change and keeps the forest care, preventing forest fires.

“Andalusia has enormous potential: it has trees, entrepreneurs and more than enough knowledge” to develop the structural wood sector, he said. In addition, having the LIFE Wood for the Future project “is an opportunity, because entrepreneurs will be able to test this tool to test their business plans”.

For his part, Manuel Guaita, director of the Structural Wood Engineering Platform (PEMADE) of the University of Santiago de Compostela, partner of LIFE Wood for the Future, explained that one of the objectives of the project is to characterize the MC poplar clone, which has excellent qualities for incorporation as a structural material in the construction of buildings and has the economic and environmental advantage of being a “zero kilometer” raw material.

Guaita has highlighted that the creation of a poplar laminated wood factory could generate “a bioeconomy at local level”, in a market of high demand due to the community regulations that require the reduction of the carbon footprint in the construction sector, which implies replacing materials such as cement or steel, which emit large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, with others such as wood, which not only do not emit CO2 but also capture it and keep it stored throughout the useful life of the buildings and, later, can be recycled in other products.

In Andalusia, he recalled, there is no factory of these characteristics, but the technological and industrial process is developed in other communities, such as Galicia or the Basque Country, where such plants have been operating for years, so the incorporation of machinery and technical staff would not pose any obstacle.