In 2019, Walmart, the world’s largest retail chain, began building its new Home Office Campus in Bentonville, Arkansas. Intended as a global flagship project for mass timber construction, the campus has recently been inaugurated. The new headquarters cover an area of more than 140 hectares and are basically a wooden city for more than 15,000 employees. The Home Office Campus consists of over 30 buildings, including office buildings, parking garages, shops, a hotel and a gym, spread across the sprawling campus.
The glued timber for the project – the equivalent of around 42,000 m³ of CLT and glulam elements – was originally supposed to be supplied by a company from nearby Conway, Arkansas. There, Canadian CLT pioneer Structurlam invested around US-$90 million in 2021 and built its first production site on US soil. However, Structurlam – and with it the glulam and CLT plant in Arkansas – was acquired by Mercer and the project was re-divided. Eventually, Smartlam supplied a significant proportion of the CLT used to build the campus.
