[canadian_tired]

Wood is renewable when you can grow it, cut it up into useful shapes, then at the end of its useful life, compost it. As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur. As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product. Not the wood so much. Replacing steel? I don't think so. Yes, steel is a dirty thing ecologically... but steel things last a long time... and require, in general minimal processing...unlike this hardened wood proposal. If steel showed up today as a new material, it would be lauded for all its technical properties. But it is now old and not so sexy.

[entropicgravity]

In addition progress making steel with a lot less CO2, by using hydrogen (and other techniques) instead of coal has come a long way. This isn't just pie in the sky, the world's second largest steel maker plans to reduce CO2 by 30% before 2030. [1] And of course steel is eminently recyclable. I'm not against wood but steel has some good long term attributes as well.

[1]https://corporate.arcelormittal.com/sustainability/climate-a...

[huntertwo]

How do they make hydrogen clean? 95% of hydrogen comes from burning fossil fuels. I doubt they're going through electrolysis to make the hydrogen or sourcing it from a supplier that does.

[ehnto]

It's part of the ongoing process, we can't skip to the final step. I think it is fair to rely on electricity and assume it will at least one day be green when thinking about green processes in totality, since some places are already generating green electricity. In my city we have a hydrogen plant powered mostly y solar that is feeding the steel mill, and this is just the beginning of exploring this process so it is bound to get more efficient.

[tiluha]

The variable nature of most renewable energy sources might make hydrogen produced by electrolysis cheap enough

[gonzo41]

You can also coke iron with carbon from plastic. It's still not super great. But it does reuse plastics which don't get recycled enough.

[XorNot]

Reusing plastics is honestly one of those "do we need to" things these days. The theory is that if we reuse them, then the waste doesn't pollute the environment - but landfilled plastic waste is basically sequestered carbon, and plastic pollution is ocean-borne and mostly being directly produced by poor environmental practice - not unrecycled plastic waste or landfill escape.

[gonzo41]

Yeah I agree, I'm pretty pro, bury plastic in the ground, but I figure if we need to coke steel rather than digging up coal we can just divert a few trucks.

[gremloni]

Yeah seriously, bury the plastic really deep away from water tables and forget about it. We clearly can’t recycle most of the stuff. Couple that with moving away from a frivolous use of plastic and I think we are golden. There are a bunch of abandoned mines miles away from substantial water tables. Fill those up.

[politician]

We can’t figure out how to store a minimal quantity of radioactive waste in a purpose-built salt mine dozens of miles away from any small town. I have no faith that we can find places to store megatons of plastic waste.

[potatoman22]

Plastic doesn't radiate.

[Chris2048]

funny question: could we mix the nuclear waste with the plastic to make (the plastic) degrade faster?

[contravariant]

I suppose it solves littering but in the end you're still just burning plastics and turning them into CO2, which isn't great.

[danuker]

Reminds me of "Plasteel" from RimWorld.

[boplicity]

Steel production is one of the largest contributors to global C02 emissions. Reducing it by 30% isn't a solution. Unfortunately, zero-carbon-emissions steel is still not feasibile, which is a major, major issue for the health of our planet.

[elzbardico]

We have to start somewhere don’t we?

[boplicity]

Yes -- but it's not a start unless we're making zero-emissions steel possible. Otherwise, it's just more of the same. (Akin to stabbing someone with a 30% smaller knife.)

[gilbetron]

A benefit of using wood is not composting it in the end. We want to pull carbon out of the air, which trees are good at, but we don't want to let it back into the air when it is done. Adding all the stuff to it increases the longevity, which is helpful.

Steel doesn't pull carbon out of the air, unfortunately.

[munk-a]

If half of the material ending up as "wood" in a building is epoxy or some other treatment, though, the efficacy of using buildings for carbon capture seems quite decreased.

[fy20]

Well epoxy is basically just lots of hydrogen and carbon with a few other elements - it could work quite well as a carbon sink too.

The raw materials to manufacture it are mostly hydrocarbons. Maybe we should be focusing on making "green epoxy" instead.

[gilbetron]

Not if there is more than a doubling in use of wood. The epoxy, or whatever, makes wood a more compelling construction material, and if it results in far more wood construction, it is a net win.

[KorematsuFredt]

Why are people not considering just growing large trees to capture carbon cut down those trees and just coat them in plastic and throw them at the bottom of ocean/desert or some kind of storage where this carbon can stay trapped for thousands of years ? What am I missing ?

I think growing trees is better than just capturing CO2 directly as growing a large forest might have other advantages and a lot of wood can be used for normal human industry as well.

[danuker]

Because 20 million trees planted would offset US emissions by 2 days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqht2bIQXIY

[whiddershins]

But I can’t tell if 20 million trees is a lot or a little.

[contravariant]

The amount of effort required for 10 million trees a day would require everyone in the US to plant a tree each month. This would likely also require people to care for enough saplings to plant a new tree each month.

It's not an insurmountable level of effort per person, but if you try to do it on a large scale you inevitably end up with logistical problems, and it would require quite a lot of space.

[logical_proof]

I am not sure I understand your math here. Let’s say every adult in the US, 300M, plants a tree each month for 12 months, 3.6B trees planted in a year. Or are you factoring in saplings that fail to grow or something? Is it that bad that for every 160 trees planted only one survives?

Edit: strike that I see what you meant there with the a day. I just should have actually read what you wrote before I commented.

[pySSK]

US adult population is around 200 million.

Also, they can't even get people to wear a mask or take a shot. Getting all these people to plant trees seems like an insurmountable task.

[runarberg]

I did some quick googling and the first figure I found was that Americans plant around 1.6 billion trees every year. That is around 4.4 million every day, almost half of what is required for the carbon offset claims by GP.

Actually 20 million trees every 2 days doesn’t sound that ridiculous. Especially as we build more green infrastructure and reduce the daily emissions.

https://www.greenandgrowing.org/how-many-trees-are-planted-e...

[CodeGlitch]

I wonder if there's any legs in algae or seaweed. Wouldn't take up valuable land to grow and is fast growing.

[gbrown]

Seaweed is great - it also pulls excess nitrogen out of the water, can be co-cropped with bivalves, can be fed to cows for decreased methane production, can be eaten directly in many forms…

If we had an actual price on carbon seaweed production would be a boom industry.

[dx034]

Couldn't you use it in large tanks to suck out CO² directly from the air? What makes this more expensive than currently proposed alternatives? Even if you don't use the seaweed in the end, you could just dry and bury it I guess?

EDIT: After some research I found an interesting article addressing this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-car...

[CodeGlitch]

That is an interesting link, thanks.

[Igelau]

I'll never understand why it's always "stop climate change" or "deny climate change" but there's essentially no room for "fix climate change" or "reverse climate change". The resources are allocated for polarization and not pragmatism.

[nl]

Carbon capture using trees is very common. Most carbin offset programs fund this.

No need to drop it to the bottom of the ocean though. Just build something out of it.

[amenghra]

https://www.terraformation.com/blog/trees-are-a-faster-solut...

[Calloutman]

Maybe because trees contain a lot of water/nutrients? Tbh I've always wondered what you've said too, though I'd just dump the wood in old mines etc.

[Calloutman]

I found this https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...

[Ma8ee]

Or build houses and bridges and stuff with them instead of concrete.

[bumby]

The US can’t keep up with infrastructure maintenance as it is, let alone moving to materials with shorter lifespans and more maintenance

[Ma8ee]

I don't think that the economy of wood is worse in the long run. It is quite much faster and cheaper to build with, and as long as it isn't allowed to be wet for long periods of time it also lasts indefinitely (there are wooden temples that are 1300 years old), and repairs are usually faster and easier than similar in concrete.

[bumby]

I'm not sure that's a good data point considering there is stone/masonry structures that old or older. Is there evidence that wood infrastructure is cheaper/more durable from a lifecycle perspective? The industry estimate for timber bridges is typically 20 years (although they may be treated to extend the life further) while 75 years or more for steel or concrete bridges. Timber/glulam also tends to deteriorate faster.

"At comparable ages and spans, smaller percentages of prestressed concrete bridges are classified "structurally deficient" than steel or timber bridges."[1]

[1]https://trid.trb.org/view/369244

[carlisle_]

There’s something to be said for the fact that harvesting wood is much more environmentally friendly than petroleum. At the very least a “wood spill” doesn’t exist as far as I know.

[AdamN]

Petroleum is definitely more environmentally friendly than the timber industry. You probably haven't driven around tree farms - monoculture that destroys the environment for hundreds of square miles. Even worse is when they pulp existing forest for things like toilet paper:

https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2019/02/26/u-s-use-of-toilet-paper-...

[KennyBlanken]

That's an article about toilet paper usage, not building material. There's no petroleum toilet paper, by the way.

Wood is biodegradable, renewable, and recyclable. It can be grown and harvested sustainably; I know because I used to work with a guy who made a living off surveying forestry for sustainable timber harvesting.

It causes no environmental issues if left to rot, doesn't have to be disposed of in a particular way.

The vast majority (well over 90%) of plastic is not recycled.

Plastic never goes away. Plastic just breaks down into microparticles that are now so pervasive there's basically no part of the planet that doesn't have microplastics, no animal that doesn't have them in its digestive system. And all the while, it's leeching out toxic chemicals.

[megameter]

Wood itself is sustainable, but in making a choice of building materials, we're also looking for total embedded energy cost and impact of the final product. Traditional buildings from a century ago relied on the harvest of old-growth wood with denser rings than the new sustainable forestry, and they were built with fewer features - when built well they didn't fail, but they weren't targeting high energy performance, climate control, dust and mold resistance, etc. We can't go back - we could lower our standards but the stock of old-growth remains depleted. New wood constructions often use processed and glued timbers because the processed timbers can be lighter(good glue is really strong) and they don't experience nearly as many quality control issues(solid wood tends to warp).

The thing is, once we start looking at wood in detail, it's never just wood. It's wood, plus adhesives, paints, and finish. You can't use just wood because it rots - you at least need to add some pigment to block UV rays and drainage to limit water pooling. Each of those additives are a potential source of VOCs(volatile organic compounds, the term that more accurately describes "chemicals"). And each step taken during processing adds energy cost. Paper and corrugated cardboard are not innocuous - they use one of the higher-energy processes relative to the amount of input material.

When you look at what you can do besides wood, you get similar tradeoffs. Stone is great, but it's still hard to work with directly, hard enough to not scale to our industrial population - as it stands, you need an artisianal economy of stonemasons to make those huge ancient constructions. Concrete has a huge climate footprint and the dust is a major VOC source. Steel is high-energy and not abundant enough to be used everywhere.

Thus, plastics enter as a way of getting some of the qualities we want. Plastics are not all one of a kind and have varying VOC content. We can't afford not to use them to have this population and quality of life, which means we have to study how to use them safely. The microplastic issue is a part of that, but it's oversold as "plastic is scary". Wood smoke is also scary, as anyone who has been around a wildfire will attest.

[reissbaker]

Curious to see some data on these claims. Yes, glue is often made out of "chemicals" — but plastic also is. Is the total environmental cost of plastic lower than wood? Besides, you're not going to frame a house with plastic: it's steel and concrete, vs wood. AFAIK plastic doesn't enter the equation here.

[short12]

We ready use plastic in decks. I bet it can be further scaled up. At what cost I have no idea though. But I wouldn't count it out as a primary building material

[quixoticelixer-]

Old growth wood is not inherintly stronger than plantation timber

[agumonkey]

Few things, maybe the way to farm trees is naive and can be done in better ways. Just entice companies to have different ways of working (even if they raise the price a little afterwards)

Also petroleum being a big factor in CO2 levels it's hard to not put it first isn't it ?

[whiddershins]

A side benefit of burning the petroleum is trees do grow much faster and bigger.

Somehow there is a synergy here we haven’t quite accessed.

Burn petroleum => release CO2 => tree grows, sequesters CO2 => use tree for something that doesn’t burn it or compost it …

I feel like we are on the edge of figuring this out.

[quixoticelixer-]

lmao

[ip26]

Steel is amazing - and as a result we use it in all kinds of places where its properties aren't fully utilized.

Aluminum has been growing into that role of "steel alternative", but there's still room for other alternatives.

[aurizon]

Looking back at Aluminium, it was once very costly - there was no economical way to extract it from clay by traditional metallurgy. When the Hall process of electrolytic extraction from molten salts was invented = huge price decline, and useage. Titanium is in a similar position, fairly common, but hard to extract economically. I hope there is a low cost electrolytic to recover Titanium found some day, as it is a very good material for all manner of uses at a lower price. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_proc...

There is a new Titanium process, not as cheap as I would like, but a lot better than we have now. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-021-00166-8

[zardo]

>Looking back at Aluminium, it was once very costly - there was no economical way to extract it from clay by traditional metallurgy.

Supposedly Napoleon III had aluminum tableware for his most honored guests, and gold for everyone else.

[aurizon]

Yes, It was very hard to liberate Aluminum from oxygen with his level of chemistry...

[pitaj]

Titanium is extremely difficult to machine, which is part of why titanium parts (like those used in airplanes) are so expensive.

[jjtheblunt]

you just reminded me of the marvelous magnesium NeXT cases, before Apple's alumin[i]um became popular.

[xxs]

magnesium is sort of a more expensive version of al.

[gnabgib]

In that it's one electron from it (like Silicon)? Magnesium is 2.2x stronger, 1.08x harder, and 2.05x more costly, 0.65x as thermally conductive and, 0.64x as dense. Think I'm missing your similarity metric

[xxs]

"nl" already brought few points. As a practical test: take a piece made of cast magnesium (alloy) or cast aluminum (alloy). It'd be hard to easily tell each other apart, save for using a weak acid. Their strength is similar (esp. when alloyed, still worse off for the aluminum) but magnesium is non-trivially lighter. Here, a random quote [0]

Magnesium is also better at casting components with thinner walls and tighter tolerances than aluminum. However, even with the many advantages of magnesium, aluminum remains a less expensive alternative for die casting.

[0]: https://diecasting.com/blog/the-difference-between-aluminum-...

[nl]

Firstly those characteristics are quite similar for different metals.

Secondly Aluminium is normally alloyed with other metals bringing the two even closer.

Finally it's a light, strong metal and used in many similar industrial products as Aluminium.

[burnished]

What do you do that the differences between magnesium and aluminum are noteworthy in casual conversation? Machining?

[katbyte]

You just reminded me that I used to have a camera with an magnesium body. That thing was a delightfully tough beast.

[contingencies]

It is also very dangerous to machine. https://www.china-machining.com/blog/cnc-machining-magnesium...

[TaylorAlexander]

Yep I was really pleased to see that ikea has started offering cheap galvanized steel shelves (named “Hyllis”). Glad to have something fully recyclable.

[Consultant32452]

We may be low on aluminum for a while.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-14/aluminum-...

[skohan]

> As for things like plywood that use glue for the laminations...glue is the most expensive and important part of the product

I've been using a lot of MDF lately, and it's interesting to think that it's just sawdust and glue. It makes me wonder: are there other fibers which could be used in a similar process which would yield better materials than MDF?

[ummonk]

I think you just reinvented fiberglass and carbon fiber

[skohan]

Oh that's true! Is carbon fiber bonded by glue?

[fasterbynight]

It's bonded by epoxy just like plywood is. Technically plywood is a composite (at least from a mechanical engineering perspective).

[wffurr]

Exactly which step of this hardened wood process uses glue? I didn’t see that anywhere in the paper.

[adrian_b]

I have not seen the paper, but the process almost certainly does not use any glue.

It must use wood compression at very high pressures, which collapses the cell walls in the wood and results in a densified high-strength wood.

There have been various methods to make densified wood for structural applications, but I assume that this is an improved process, which makes an even denser and more homogeneous material, which ensures that even blades can be made from it.

Edit: According to Phys.org, the improvement over the previous processes is a treatment in a chemical bath that removes the lignin and other components of the wood, leaving only the cellulose, before the compression.

This removal of the non-cellulose components ensures that the densified wood is harder and with less defects than those made with the older processes.

[nl]

This process doesn't use glue. It relies on compressing wood and removal of ligand.

[hilbert42]

"But it is now old and not so sexy."

Yeah, maybe. But you're right, when it comes to metals, steel's vastly most substantial component, iron is about the most abundant metallic element in the universe, so it ain't gonna disappear from our manufacturing materials list anytime soon.

Iron and steels have their obvious problems - rust for instance, bad performance high high temperatures is another and it'd be nice if iron had properties more like say titanium but that's wishful thinking.

Taming iron to behave the way we want it to has always been and still is a major problem. For example, stainless steel is expensive and it's always been a bit of a kludge (the need for hundreds of different varieties of alloys attest to that; same goes for hardness, for instance, the many tool-steel-like alloys that are needed by industry).

If anything, we need considerably more material science research to make iron alloys much better than they are now and thus make them appear very sexy to everyone's eyes.

[EGreg]

Not to mention all that carbon released when the wood decomposes - no ?

[mikeg8]

No expert here but I believe it depends on how it decomposes. If wood rots at the surface, my understanding is more carbon is released into the atmosphere but if it is buried or decomposed using fungi or soil microbes, more carbon is captured into the soil.

Forests have a lot of decaying and decomposing deadfall wood but still seem to be a carbon sink so it may be a layering thing...

[spfzero]

That's the reason you use wood chips and bark for mulch in a garden; to add carbon to the soil.

[psd1]

It isn't the usual primary reason. You use these things to provide a mulch layer over the top of tilth; it suppresses weed germination.

If all you want is to add organics, you'd probably fork in manure.

[noselasd]

It was captured from the air when the wood was grown though - so as long as you maintain the forrest you took the wood from it works out.

[mensetmanusman]

No, not all carbon is released as gas during decomposition. If it were, we wouldn’t have diamonds :)

[burnished]

I don't know enough about diamond formation to properly dispute this, but I thought they didn't form from organic, locally sourced carbon?

[ajnin]

Yes, that's why planting trees to offset carbon emissions is not really as good an idea as it seems, trees can live a long time but they're not immortal, and when they die they release their carbon back into the environment.

[pxndx]

If you turn what now is barren land or grasslands into a forest, it absorbs CO2 as it grows, and that CO2 stays captured for as long as that land is a forest, it doesn't matter if individual trees die and decompose.

[robotresearcher]

If you leave them alone to make baby trees, they can be an amortized constant capture or better.

Meanwhile they liberate oxygen, which I enjoy daily.

[booi]

By released I assume you mean into the air? I think only if it's burned?

[lindseymysse]

You can make steel with charcoal, which is carbon neutral in the end: https://aeon.co/essays/could-we-reboot-a-modern-civilisation...

What I like about this idea is it's a way to take carbon out of the air while manufacturing something. We are going to have to deal with carbon no matter what, why not manufacture things with it?

[i_am_proteus]

Making steel is how we got here. Europe was decimating her forests for charcoal. England ran out first, then turned to coal, then needed to pump water out of coal mines...

[lindseymysse]

Thanks for that history. Alas, no such thing as a free lunch.

[i_am_proteus]

Lunch has never been free.

Good reads, if this area interests you, are Fernand Braudel Civilization and Capitalism Vol 1: The Structures of Everyday Life and Vaclav Smil Energy and Civilization: A History.

[8note]

It has a carbon neutral implementation (grow trees, the burn them) but it also has a carbon positive alternative which I much cheaper (cut down existing forests an go out of business once there's no forests)

Wood chip heating already has that problem

[tuatoru]

> You can make steel with charcoal

Not at the scale at which the world needs steel.

[fy20]

How is Plywood and OSB recycled (for the municipalities that do so)? Wouldn't the different types of glue (from different manufacturers or grades) cause problems there? Or is it just used as an industrial fuel where the glue is burned off?

[soperj]

It doesn't last so long in construction, rebar in concrete has like a 75 year lifespan no?

[tedivm]

> In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less. Building codes and policies generally require buildings to survive for several decades, but deterioration can begin in as little as 10 years.

[zardo]

Plus or minus 25 years depending on the environment and maintenance. But I would disagree that 75 years is not so long.

[katbyte]

Does that not depend if it’s stainless or not?

[zardo]

I think that's only used for structures immersed in seawater.

It's not that we can't design buildings to last longer, it's that you don't want to design a building to last two centuries when you know it's probably going to be torn down in 50 years no matter what shape it's in.

[meltedcapacitor]

Stainless steel rebar is also used for (not only seaside) bridges etc, but at 10x the cost it's not going to be in ordinary buildings.

If a building is made harder to demolish than its neighbours it's got a better chance to survive. I plan plutonium-core concrete walls for my mausoleum to prevent future generations from interfering with it.

[noja]

All good points, but... https://www.plasticstoday.com/materials/sorry-folks-oil-does...

[FpUser]

>"As soon as you add a shit load of processing and plastic and other stuff it's not "wood" anymore than gasoline is a dead dinosaur.

This is priceless. love it.

[spfzero]

At least this material has a main ingredient that is renewable. No part of steel is renewable right? You can't grow more iron ore (though there is a lot of it lying around).

Also I'm doubting "minimal processing" for steel. You have to dig up the ore with giant machines, transport huge amounts of it by train, smash it with a lot of energy and heavy equipment, melt it with a lot of energy and heavy equipment, etc., etc. This seems like the opposite of minimal?

[xxs]

>You can't grow more iron ore

Steel is perfectly recyclable, but even then there is plenty of iron on earth. We won't be running out of iron.

Edit: Of course, steel is just a name of class of alloys - some of the steel types have a rarer elements like Mo, Ti, V...

[mywittyname]

Wood also requires heavy equipment to cut, mill, process. Not to mention, it needs a heck of a lot of land area. In addition to whatever process is involved in "hardening" this wood.

Plus, steel is entirely recyclable. And it has some natural properties that make is relatively easy to recycle. It can be sorted with magnets, and it has a higher melting point than most impurities.

[djrogers]

The big advantage to wood though, is that while it's growing it's a carbon sink, and once hardened that carbon is likely stored forever.

[korantu]

you can achieve the same effect by making plastic with captured co2 [1]. Carbon would stay in plastic for very long time.

This way you get to reuse all the (enormous) existing infrastructure, as well.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2227-9717/9/5/759/pdf

[patmorgan23]

Steel can be recycled/reused pretty easily. Just melt it down on an arc furnace and recast it. Can the same be said for hardened wood?

[AlexandrB]

Indeed, steel is so recyclable that people will pay you for it regardless of condition. Contrast that to any kind of wood/pulp product.

[WalterBright]

> You can't grow more iron ore (though there is a lot of it lying around).

We live on a thin crusty shell around a ball of iron.

[adrian_b]

The ball of iron would be Earth's core, and between the thin crust on which we live and the iron core there is the very thick mantle.

Nevertheless, the mantle is made of a mixture of iron oxides, silicon dioxide and magnesium oxide, with small quantities of the other elements, so under the thin crust, even if there remain thousands of kilometers until the iron ball, there is nonetheless what is essentially a huge amount of iron ore.

[_nalply]

> ball of iron

... which is way beyond our reach.

[8note]

The iron in the universe is increasing over time.

On earth it replenishes too via meteorite strikes and by nuclear decay. I'm not sure was decays into iron, but I'm sure it's most things, given its name as the most stable element

Mind you, rust is quite similar to iron ore

[debacle]

Considering that the graphic references basswood, my guess is that the primary component of the final product, by mass, is not wood.