New net zero Bush School comes together with mass plywood panels
It won’t open until next spring, but an addition to The Bush School in Seattle is already teaching lessons in green construction. The 20,000-square-foot building is under construction on Bush’s upper campus at Hillside Drive East and Lake Washington Boulevard East. It
will serve high school kids with 10 seminar-style classrooms, causal break-out areas, a 400-seat multipurpose room with pre-function space, student lounge, student/faculty collaboration center, catering kitchen, administrative offices and a faculty workroom.

The addition faces Lake Washington Boulevard East, with the school’s historic Gracemont building behind it.
Tragedy to gateway: Wildfire-salvaged wood gets new life at Portland International airport
When the 2020 Labor Day wildfires burned 50 miles to the south, destroying more than 3,000 homes and scorching 1.2 million acres of trees, the lingering smoke cast the state’s largest airport in a haze. Now, as the Portland international Airport takes on an ambitious $2.2 billion makeover that will expand the main terminal and make significant improvements, much of the wood for the new roof over the main terminal is coming from wood salvaged from those wildfires.

Crews with Hoffman-Skanska work on the new $2billon remodel of the roof using salvage wood product from Freres Engineered Wood Co. at Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon on Friday, July 16, 2021.
OREGON TIMBER PRODUCT GETS THE TREMOR TEST IN UNIVERSITY STUDY
PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) – A Lyons-based lumber company is providing wood materials to a large-scale university research project that aims to prove tall timber buildings can be resilient to earthquakes. The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) TallWood project began in 2016. The following year, researchers performed a shake table test at the University of California San Diego on a two-story mass timber building structure to see how it fared when faced with earthquake-like tremors.

Freres Engineered Wood Co. will be Providing the Mass Timber used in the vertical walls of the building, as seen in the his design. Image curtesy shilling PEI, NHERI Tallwood Project Team.
Microsoft selects Freres Lumber, ACTbiochar CO2 removal project for Carbon Removal Program
ACT, the leading provider of custom market-based solutions for reducing carbon footprints, and Freres Lumber Co., a premier engineered food products manufacturing company, today announced that Microsoft selected their Biochar CO2 Removal Project for its 2022 Carbon Removal Program.
Founded in 2009, ACT helps companies and organizations around the world reduce their carbon footprint by backing high-impact climate projects that generate renewable certificates and carbon credits. Microsoft has agreed to purchase the carbon removal credits generated by the project, and Freres has committed to investing part of the sales proceeds to research and development around biochar production – among other sustainability initiatives.

State’s first passive house school building opens
This school year, students in the BushSchool’s Upper School are takingclasses in the first passive house schoolbuilding to be completed in the state.The new upper school was finished inMay and took approximately 18months to build. It is designed byMithun and built by Exxel Pacific.
The passive house building, located onthe private school’s Madison Valleycampus, totals 20,000 square feet andconsists of ten classrooms and casualbreak-out areas on two upper levels,and a basement level with a 400-seatmultipurpose room with pre-functionspace. The three-story building alsohas a student lounge, student/facultycollaboration center, administrativeoffices and a faculty work room.

A transparent student life center and accessible entry porchwelcomes students to the upper school.
The Climate Economy: TallWood Design Institute director on how mass timber is taking root in Oregon
Mass timber has carried a burden in Oregon since the middle
of the last decade, when it began to be promoted as a sustainable
building-material alternative to steel and concrete and their
hefty greenhouse-gas emissions footprints, and as a catalyst to
revive the long-suffering forest economy.

Post $40M investment, Freres Engineered Wood’s alternative product business grows
Freres Engineered Wood — formerly known as Freres Lumber
Co. — made its first mass plywood panel in 2017 after investing
$40 million into developing the engineered wood product,
including building a 182,000-square-foot manufacturing facility.

FRERES CELEBRATES CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY
Lyons, Ore.-based Freres Lumber Co., now doing business as Freres Engineered Wood, is celebrating its centennial year, marking a century of transformative growth and positive impact on the wood products industry, clients, employees, and its surrounding communities. Freres celebrates this monumental milestone by unveiling its new brand and logo which commemorate Freres’ longstanding history while reflecting its commitment to innovation and advancements as it looks forward to the next 100 years.

Restore Forests, Decarbonize Building, And Sequester Carbon Through Forestry, Biomass Energy, And Biochar
Forest and biomass industries can help grow biochar production and use. One Oregon mill, the Freres Lumber Company, converts renewable fiber to carbon smart building materials, supplies fiber to paper and engineered wood products, generates firm renewable power, sequesters carbon, and enables carbon and nutrient cycling with biochar.
