“We’re committed to meeting the increasing needs of today’s building industry without disadvantaging future generations,” says Daniel Gudsell, Founding Director at Abodo. For more than 20 years, Daniel has been working with rapidly renewable plantation timber to create beautiful, durable, carbon-beneficial building solutions.
“At the beginning of my career, I spent three or four years working in the building materials space before I decided to go out on my own with Abodo. I had spent some time travelling around the Pacific Islands and noted that people in Samoa, Tonga and American Samoa were exhausting their native timbers by either using them to build their houses or packing them into shipping containers to send to China. I could see that these slow-growing timbers were going to quickly run out and I recognised the opportunity to provide an alternative. I also realised that if this was happening in the South Pacific, it would also inevitably happen elsewhere.”
Daniel started to explore ways that sustainable timber could look and perform comparably to old-growth timbers. “I recognised that people value these old-growth materials because of the way they look and how they perform over time, but they don’t always take into account that they are unsustainable, no matter how you spin it. I also learned that New Zealand imports about $100m/year of old-growth cedar from Canada; these trees are typically 300-800 years old. The question we need to be asking is whether or not there will be as much or more of a resource left for future generations. If the answer is no, it’s not sustainable. It’s that simple.”
Photography credit: Dunlop Builders
With Abodo, Daniel has brought thermal modification technology to New Zealand from Europe that enables his team to transform renewable plantation timber into durable wood that can stand the test of time. “This technology was developed over 100 years ago; it uses high-temperature kilns to caramelise the resins in the wood and alters its cellular walls, making it more durable without the need for any chemical treatments or additives. We’ve had to go through a lot of testing to show that Abodo Wood is as good or better than existing timber solutions, and we then used that data to get a CodeMark certification to assure building professionals that our material is code-compliant.”
Abodo performs particularly well in window and door applications, Daniel says. “In addition to being aesthetically pleasing - akin to a tropical timber - and stable, Abodo Wood also boasts 20% better thermal conductivity, meaning it is a better insulator than traditional timber. The New Zealand market is only just starting to recognise this benefit, but we’ve already seen our windows and doors market explode in the UK. There’s been so much growth there that we’ve decided to head over for a roadshow in April. We’ll be doing three sessions a day in stadiums across the UK about Abodo and why it’s the future of wood.”
Photography credit: Dunlop Builders
The European export market has pushed Abodo to outperform on other measures as well, Daniel says. “Because we trade in Europe, we have to compete with the global market on CO2 emissions. We find that the architects we work with there are often even more driven by those measures than they are by design aesthetic. Embodied carbon is a priority, and even when we’re shipping product 20,000 kilometres, it’s still storing around 500kg of CO2 per cubic metre. This means that, in addition to being energy efficient and having no chemical additives, Abodo Wood is carbon negative.”
Abodo Wood is now being used in high-end residential and commercial projects worldwide. “It’s exciting to see how people are using our product,” Daniel says. “We recently contributed to New Zealand’s first Passive House-certified office with Dunlop Builders. It gave us some satisfaction to see the vast array of uses for our material including windows, doors, curtain wall, cladding and decking.”
Creating a more sustainable future for the building industry is what inspires Daniel, even if the path to get there isn’t always easy. “I get a lot of satisfaction and pride out of creating value in New Zealand. In our own humble way, Abodo is elevating wood processing. In what has long been an unglamorous industry, people are just now starting to note that wood is quite a sophisticated material that has the potential to mitigate and embody carbon. We want Abodo to bring more mana to the industry, and to use our position to encourage New Zealand’s forestry industry to better communicate some of the good work that’s being done around biodiversity and environmental projects.”
Photography credit: Dunlop Builders
The Abodo team has a joint focus for 2024, Daniel says: fire and maintenance. “These are two major pain points for our market. We’ve spent six or seven years working on a fire-retardant version of our product that we’re excited to soft-launch this year. Additionally, we recognise the challenges around maintaining all wood products and we’re conducting ongoing research and development about how we can ensure that Abodo material looks great over time with less maintenance. That’s going to be a big focus for us over the year ahead. We’re also launching a more streamlined, cost-effective version of our product to make it accessible for a wider range of builds. We always want to make a positive impact; one of the ways we can do this is to bring our product within reach for more projects.”
To learn more and connect with Daniel, visit https://www.abodo.co.nz/ and follow him on LinkedIn.
