[peatmoss]

I keep hoping to see advancements in lab grown wood beyond what was reported a few years ago. My dream is enormous sheets of plywood with many layers of fibers all with ideal orientations, grown at sea on barges, taking up growing nutrients and e.g. fire retardant minerals from sea water. The barges would cross the equator seasonally to maximize sunlight.

[spinarrets]

Seawater is pretty nutrient poor in many places. The places where seawater is nutrient rich there tends to be a lot of biodiversity already.

[kayodelycaon]

I’m honestly curious, what makes this better than farming pine trees?

[peatmoss]

As someone else mentioned, pine trees aren't a great material. But apart from that, giant monoculture forests are not excellent. Old growth forests host a degree of biodiversity and ecological function that tree farms generally don't.

Lab / barge-cultured wood products could potentially have really great materials properties that the natural stuff doesn't. Plywood is super useful stuff, and the best is made from more layers. The orientation of the wood fibers is flipped 90 degrees from layer to layer to give its strength in multiple dimensions. The more perfectly uniform the grain of each layer, the better quality the plywood. Voids and grain runouts create a locally weak spot or cosmetic issues. Weak spots generally don't correspond through layers, and the material generally isn't pushed to its theoretical limits in application. And cosmetically, better quality plywood reserves the highest quality layers for the outermost visible layers.

Baltic birch plywood is considered The Good Stuff and is made by essentially peeling a tree that grows pretty straight and pretty uniform. But you can imagine growing a seamless sheet of plywood that is even more perfect. Maybe one or two layers of fibers running one direction, before the next layer is encouraged to flip orientation. The platonic ideal of plywood, without needing to peel trees and stick layers together with glue.

And again, if we get freaky with the cell cultures, you can imagine cool properties where layers take up minerals from sea water that help with e.g. rot resistance or fire resistance. Or even freakier, maybe we figure out how to incorporate synthetic or lab cultured spider silk with our plywood, giving it truly novel material properties.

[chillingeffect]

Pine trees specifically are low quality wood. Key issues with natural wood generally are warping due to humidity and misaligned fibres, strength, rot.

[dekhn]

There's a big dynamic range in pine. For example, I work with everything from big-box-store lowest-cost pine lumber (2x4s) to kiln-dried select pine.

The low quality stuff is full of knots, warped (with very high variable humidity- some beams weigh 2x other beams). The high quality stuff is.... not as nice as maple, but certainly it's dense, uniform, and doesn't warp. From what I can tell, it's because they select the high quality stuff, then kiln-dry it and mill it.

Also if you inspect cheap 2x4s, there are often some higher quality pieces (few knots, straight-ish, not too wet) which you can then trim and plane to get decent wood.

But yeah, pine is sort of an industrial product grown fast at scale.

[gtowey]

That's a silly statement.

Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it!

It's by a massive margin, the most common lumber used in construction. Its strength and other properties are well understood and all you have to do is follow the specifications and it performs great.

I mean what would even be the advantage to using other woods for home construction? Using a "stronger" wood means what? You can make your structural members smaller than 2x4? What would be the point? Walls need space for insulation and wires and pipes, there's no good reason to use a more dense wood. And it would still be more expensive! Pine is perfect for what it does because it meets the practical and engineering needs at the least expensive price.

[chaps]

Your comment is even sillier, friend. Pine being a low-quality wood doesn't mean it's not useful.

[devrandoom]

> Pine is well suited to its use

What isn't well suited for it's use?

[justaman]

Woodworking. Tables, chairs, etc. You typically a want a hardwood for these crafts. However, it you're going to make cheap stuff that won't last... pine is fine.

[hyperbovine]

This is a common misconception usually spouted off by “elite” (aka beginning) woodworkers. Pine (white pine in particular) is a great material for woodworking. Much cheaper and more forgiving than harder species, takes stain well, and looks incredible when properly finished. If you think it won’t last, go look at pretty much any barn built over 100 years ago in the eastern US that is still standing. More often than not you’ll find thousands of board feet of old growth white pine inside. Similarly, many heirloom pieces from the same region and period are pine. They used what they had.

https://www.finewoodworking.com/2022/06/16/for-the-love-of-p...

[nativeit]

Hardwood would make terrible construction lumber, which is the point the person defending pine was making.

[wood_spirit]

Lots of modern construction is well behind the times. Eg most new residential buildings in England are still brick instead of wood stick framing and insulation. At least they adopted cavities! But houses in England are correspondingly cold and damp and cost a fortune to heat up. If only they imported more pine!

[__MatrixMan__]

Computers. We put a lot of work into keeping certain data scarce and that's at odds with the nature of a computer, which is much better at making copies than preventing them.

[msla]

> Pine is well suited to its use, otherwise, well, we wouldn't use it!

This statement works just as well if you replace "pine" with "leaded gasoline".

[gtowey]

A lot of people seem to think my statement is a tautology, but it's not.

It's exactly my point that not every material is good for its use. Even ones used in the overwhelming majority of cases -- like leaded gasoline. The ensuing environmental disaster shows it was exactly the wrong choice of material to solve the problem.

[msla]

"It must be good because people use it" is not a good argument.

Even if people use that argument quite a bit.

[alwa]

True, although I’m not sure I understand the comparison. Are there negative externalities to pine framing that other types of wood wouldn’t have? Or is the concern with wood framing in general, as opposed to some other kind of building system?

[nativeit]

Cool word play…but that doesn’t invalidate any of their points?

[__MatrixMan__]

I'm skeptical that the soil in a lumber forest will remain viable for growing trees indefinitely. Crop rotation and fallow is necessary for sustained growth of other crops, it's probably necessary for trees too, just on a larger timescale.

[kayodelycaon]

Crop rotation is needed for yearly crops that deplete soil. By harvesting them, you’re removing the nutrients.

As I understand it, you’re not taking any significant amount of nutrients when you harvest the trunks of trees and leave the branches behind to replenish the soil.

Controlled burning can also be used to speed up the process. Some species of pine trees actually require fire to reproduce.

There are questions about making the soil more acidic. Pine trees grow better in acidic soil. Correlation is not necessarily causation.

[__MatrixMan__]

Lignin is C31H34O11, all stuff that the tree can get from air and water, so you've got a point there.

But a tree trunk is more than just lignin. Also it could be more complex than whether you're robbing the soil of nitrogen and phosphorous. There's a lot we don't know about the role of soil microbiota, for instance. I don't have any evidence that it's going to be a problem, but nobody has evidence that it's not going to be a problem either (only that it hasn't yet).

Although I guess this is all orthogonal to whether, once you've harvested the wood by whatever means, you process it into something stronger and denser.

[thuanao]

Trees are still farmed for the wood. This is only a method for processing the wood into a stronger material.

[literalAardvark]

The fact that it's a wonderful example of a silicon valley solution

That and the maximised sunlight

[verisimi]

[flagged]

[devrandoom]

Strange but fantastic

[carlosjobim]

Waves.

[peatmoss]

Potentially a major boon if you want to distribute nutrient bath across a large flat cell culture plate!

Also, trees sway in the wind.