The concept for Underground Forest was developed by Kees de Gruiter and he founded Underground Forest BV in 2023 for this purpose. With the Paris climate agreements and CO2 pricing, feasibility also came within reach financially. Together with forestier Geoffrey Huet (HuetBois SA, Manhay, Belgium) and heiers Arie Hogendoorn and René Muit (Hogendoorn BV, Ouderkerk aan den IJssel, the Netherlands), he set up a chain through which the supply of Norway spruce from sustainably managed forest, transport by water to the Netherlands until the trunk disappears deep into the soil of clay or peat is complete. Through close coordination with Sven Jense of Oncra, we are assured of reliable certification of the CO2 removed from the atmosphere by the spruce in the Ardennes.
Piling with wood has also been used in the Netherlands for five hundred years, and as long as the pile heads remain below the groundwater level, wooden piles still hold up almost all pre-1940 buildings. Then concrete became popular. Most pre-war houses had a pile every few metres sticking the tip into the first layer of sand, but sometimes they were built in densities close to those of Venice. The Palace on Dam Square stands on 13,863 wooden piles. That's two and a half per square metre. Even Rotterdam's White House, still the tallest building in Europe in the late nineteenth century, still stands proudly on wooden stilts.
Because we have hardly built on wooden foundations in the last 80 years, a lot of knowledge has been lost. Still this year, we are going to set up a field lab with two fields, one with piles that rest firmly on the first layer of sand and one with floating piles where the top is two metres below the groundwater and the bottom does not rest in the sand. Do these affect the dynamics of the subsoil? How much does the ground level rise due to the increase in the volume of organic matter in the soil? Can subsoil reinforcement have benefits for agricultural use?
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