Toxin-free treated wood
Wood for outdoor decks and playground equipment is infused with amorphous glass that turns off bugs without harming them—or the environment.
Wood treated by an innovative and environmentally friendly process called TimberSil will soon be available to builders and consumers for decks, docks, fences, and children’s playground equipment. TimberSil, based on a sodium silicate formula, protects wood in a radically different way than competing products by eliminating the toxic and corrosive side effects associated with conventional arsenic- and copper-based treatments. The new product promises to be gentler to the environment than products based on pesticides.
Wood intended for outdoor use must be treated to protect it from insects and microbial agents. Since the 1970s, most wood used in outdoor residential settings has been treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA), a chemical preservative containing chromium, copper, and arsenic. Because of health and environmental concerns about the chemicals, including arsenic, that leach out of structures made with CCA-treated wood, CCA was phased out of consumer use in 2003, thanks to an agreement between the U.S. EPA and industry. Concerns about the long-term environmental impact of CCA-treated wood were heightened recently when researchers found that arsenic is leaching from utility poles and railway ties—structures not covered under the agreement with EPA.
Since the phaseout of CCA, several arsenic-free wood treatment alternatives have emerged, including preservatives based on amine copper quat (ACQ), borates (disodium octoborate tetrahydrate), and copper azoles. Other building materials, including composites and redwoods such as cedar, have also grown in use. The other wood treatments work essentially the same way CCA did—as pesticides that poison invading organisms.
TimberSil takes a different tack. The treatment infuses wood with amorphous glass, making it water insoluble and therefore no longer an attractive form of food for bugs and other microbial agents.
“We don’t kill anything,” explains TimberSil’s inventor Karen Slimak, an environmental toxicologist and CEO of Timber Treatment Technologies. “We just don’t interact at all. Organisms are not going to get a food source or a water source. We have modified the habitat enough so that it no longer fulfills the survival requirements for the organisms, and they move on.”
TimberSil uses a “micro-manufacturing process” to create a barrier, making wood unavailable to small insects and microbes and rendering it unrecognizable as a food source at the cellular level. Although, for competitive reasons, Slimak declines to describe the process in much detail, she acknowledges that it involves first infusing a water-based formula containing various ingredients, including sodium silicate, into the wood and then heating it under certain conditions. The end result is that “we surround the millions of fibers that comprise wood with layers of amorphous glass that are only a few molecules thick.” Organisms perceive the finished product as amorphous glass, not wood, and lose interest.
Because TimberSil is not toxic, its environmental impact is expected to be negligible, says Slimak. “The properties of amorphous glass are well known, and known to be innocuous.” Timber Treatment Technologies has met with the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) to discuss pursuing the organization’s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification.
Early reviews of TimberSil from the rapidly growing green building market have been positive. For example, Environmental Building News, which is published by BuildingGreen, a member of USGBC, recognized TimberSil as one of its top-10 green products in 2004.
“Assuming that it performs as expected [over the years], the TimberSil sodium silicate treatment process has the potential to revolutionize wood treatment, because it eliminates the use of toxic chemicals,” explains Alex Wilson, executive editor of Environmental Building News, who served on USGBC’s board of directors from 2004 through 2005.
Unlike CCA, “sodium silicate is a fairly harmless chemical that has been widely used in laundry detergent and other consumer products for over 100 years and as a corrosion inhibitor in municipal water treatment plants. It is not considered harmful to humans and is not regulated by the EPA,” Wilson says. A further benefit of sodium silicate, he points out, is that, “unlike the conventional replacements to CCA [ACQ and copper azoles], TimberSil is not corrosive to steel. Corrosivity has become a very significant problem, particularly with ACQ. In some situations, steel fasteners are corroding and structural failures may occur.”
The good news for builders—and consumers—everywhere is that TimberSil products appear to do everything their competitors do—and do it all more benignly. They are backed by a 40-year warranty, which is twice the industry standard. TimberSil prices are higher than for treated-wood competitors based on copper but lower than for products that use other materials, such as cedar and composites. U.S. consumers will start to see TimberSil products on store shelves this spring. They will be distributed by Huttig Building Products, the largest national distributor of millwork and building products to professional dealers.
