Mercer Mass Timber’s Nick Milestone Discusses How Mass Timber is Revolutionizing Construction

Earlier this week, Nick Milestone, Vice President of Projects and Construction for Mercer Mass Timber, sat down with Wood Central for an exclusive interview about how the building industry is changing with the emergence of technologies—first with BIM and now AI—which, together, are making construction smarter and more efficient than ever before.

“Mass timber is almost the next industrial revolution or the next industrial evolution,” Mr. Milestone told Wood Central. “We are starting to see that in the rollout of software packages, where structural steel software is now adapting itself to mass timber.”

Milestone is a four-decade veteran of construction manufacturing with deep expertise in structural steelwork and, since 2006, in mass timber too: “Back in the UK, his native country, big retailers wanted to do eco-friendly stores, we came up with a hybrid model (timber with steel) to reduce costs and maintain carbon neutrality,” adding, “Cross-laminated timber (CLT) was a real game changer for our industry. Now we had these full structural steel frames with CLT floor decks, full mass timber residential developments.”

As a subsidiary of Mercer International, one of the world’s largest forest products companies, Mercer Mass Timber operates three mass timber plants—one in Canada and two in the United States—making it the biggest domestic supply into the North American market. Together, the three plants work to meet construction schedules. “We need the growth to go from 1% to 2% and 3% of the total building material market because we are fulfilling current supply on a single shift,” Milestone said.

The full interview is available here.