Honkarakenne to exhibit ecological wood construction at the Astana EXPO 2017 World Fair
PRESS RELEASE 14 March 2017 at 10.00 a.m.
Honkarakenne will participate in the Astana EXPO 2017 World Fair as a partner of the Finnish Pavilion. The exhibition will be organised from 10 June to 19 September 2017 in Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan. The exhibition presents energy-related know-how, clean solutions and renewable energy alternatives from Finland.
“We aim to be the leading supplier of ecological and healthy houses in our selected markets. Ecological consumer habits are a global trend, and more and more people want to invest in high-quality living and the well-being of their family. Kazakhstan and the surrounding areas offer us attractive growing markets,” says Marko Saarelainen, CEO of Honkarakenne.
The first Honkarakenne houses were delivered to Kazakhstan in the 1990s. In 2016, Honkarakenne’s importer opened a new sales office in Almaty and expanded its range of services to cover diverse design and construction services tailored to local needs.
Healthy homes, leisure houses and public buildings in Finnish wood
Log houses offer a comfortable, healthy and safe choice for both private homes and public buildings such as schools, day care centres, nursing homes and site development properties. A log building which breathes naturally has good indoor air, as solid wood is an efficient balancer of variations in air humidity. Pine wood offers a natural surface material that is both moisture safe and anti-bacterial. When well designed and correctly built, a log building may last for hundreds of years, offering an excellent choice even in earth quake areas.
Ecologically sustainable production
More than 70% of Finland’s area is covered in forests, and in accordance with Finnish principles of sustainable forestry, more wood is always grown than felled. Honkarakenne sources its raw materials solely from woods with PEFC certification. This ensures that the procurement of materials follows the principles of sustainable development.
Wood is processed at Honkarakenne’s own factory in Karstula, Finland, on the basis of the order-delivery principle into precisely measured house packages. What little waste is left from the production is utilised to produce heat energy for the Karstula municipality. The production process has been granted the ISO 9001 quality certificate and the ISO 14001 environmental certificate. The electricity consumed by the factory is produced solely from renewable energy sources.
Log houses have small carbon footprints
When building materials are compared ecologically, wood really stands out. Processing wood into building material uses significantly less energy than the production of other materials – only around 50% of the energy required for cement and 20% of the energy required for bricks. The life cycles of modern log houses come with small carbon footprints, as when a tree grows, it binds a significant amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: For instance, a log house with an area of 150 square metres binds 90,000 kilograms of carbon dioxide, which is equal to a drive of 560,000 kilometres in a car. Wood does not create hazardous waste, and 100% of the product can be recycled. Overall, it can be said that the more wood is used in the building, the more sustainable the project is ecologically.
Additional information:
Maria Turenkova, Sales Director – Russia & CIS, maria.turenkova@honka.com, +358 50 4136152
High resolution photos available: https://honka.com/press
Honkarakenne Plc produces ecological, healthy, high-quality houses, leisure apartments and public buildings from solid Finnish wood under its trademark Honka®. The company was founded in 1958, and it has delivered 85,000 buildings in more than 50 countries. The house packages are produced in the company’s own factory in Karstula, Finland. In 2016, the turnover of Honkarakenne Group amounted to EUR 36.1million, of which exports comprised 49%.