10 ms·

Could wooden building be a solution to climate change?

128 points by oori 7y ago

oori 7y ago
Very interesting article. Quote: Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada's great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled. Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.
- mrob 7y ago
  Even if there's no demand for wood, the trees should still be harvested because they can be pyrolized to produce fuel gas/oil and biochar. About 50% of the carbon can be converted to biochar, which is both a valuable soil amendment and a way to long-term sequester carbon such that it can't be easily extracted. And the carbon released by burning the remainder would have been released to the atmosphere away as the trees decayed, so it's better it does something useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
  - YayamiOmate 7y ago
    Do you say its an efficient battery for solar power?
    - mrob 7y ago
      My guess is probably not, because photosynthesis is not very efficient. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency But if the trees are already grown then I think we should use them, and not just leave them to rot.
- quixoticelixer- 7y ago
  That's not quite true, it takes a lot longer than 80 years for forests to stop sequestering CO2, even for fast growing species.
  - ARandomerDude 7y ago
    I don't think that was the argument. OP was saying after maturity the scales tip to being net emitters.
    - quixoticelixer- 7y ago
      They don't really ever change to be net emmitters, and it takes a long time for them to stop absorbing carbon ( a few hundred years)
      - benj111 7y ago
        Do you have a source? Because you're directly contradicting the article.
        aukust 7y ago
        Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that European spruce stores more CO2 than it sheds way over 80 years old as a spruce grows in mass significantly decades after reaching that age. However here is a study that tries to bring some light to carbon pools on over-mature 167-213 year-old trees: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/435/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/435/pdf
        bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Anecdotal evidence tells me that spruce trees are really good at suppressing undergrowth due to their acidic needless so claiming a mature first is a net emitter makes sense to me. The trees may be growing, but nothing else is.
        quixoticelixer- 7y ago
- YayamiOmate 7y ago
  Its an obvious tautology to me. If you allow decomposition then obvioisly net must be zero. If you createa object and destroy it, it pretty much has to release its source material in some form. If tree stops growing it obviously has to have zero net. Anything absorbing anything has either to store it - grow, or release it in some form. Carbon is element, what are the options? Store it permanently, transform chemically and release, or transform it atomically and change the element but tree is not a nuclear plant.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    As long as it's wood, it's emission negative
- mistrial9 7y ago
  .. it is not "plummeting demand" .. it is a bump in the massive consumption growth curve of the modern age.. aside from that, all paths need to be considered.
- mywittyname 7y ago
  Governments should pay to have the mature trees harvested, then tossed into some body of water, and eventually covered with dirt. At that point, the carbon sequestration will last for a 1000+ years. Should demand ever increase, then the felled trees could be reharvested, cured, then used as normal.
BurningFrog 7y ago
The understanding that "captured carbon" is mostly just another word for "wood" is sadly rare.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
I believe wooden building of the sort described in the article can be a solution to climate change, in the normally understood usage of the word solution, if combined with a time machine.
- jonwinstanley 7y ago
  Agreed, time machine is probably the only hope. Now that we have melted large parts of polar permafrost and the arctic is on fire, "fixing" climate change is not really possible. More about coming to terms with what we've done and how to cope with the new world we have created. My bet, it won't be pretty.
benrbray 7y ago
Also briefly discussed on a recent episode of 99% invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/
murukesh_s 7y ago
Also there is ventilation/cooling aspect for wooden houses which works favourably in tropical climates, especially when used in roofing. Not sure about its effect on colder climates.
- eitland 7y ago
  It works really well in colder climates as well. In fact I guess the overwhelming majority of homes outside the city centers in Norway are wooden houses.
  - markdown 7y ago
    And in Japan.
  - stareatgoats 7y ago
    According to our local carpenter the wooden houses in Scandinavia are rapidly deteriorating because of the increase in temperature. His take is that wooden houses need a long cold spell in winter in order to slow down the attack by tree-eating organisms during summer. Could be depending on the widespread usage of fir trees for house-building, other types of trees may be more resilient to warm climates.
    - benj111 7y ago
      What kind of organisms? My experience of older mainland European houses is southern France. All the floor beams are made of ancient gnarly woodworm eaten hard wood, but it only really affects the outer cm of wood. So I wonder if the problem is partially newer building techniques, thinner cut wood, less dense wood?
      - blaser-waffle 7y ago
        If Scandinavia is anything like Canada, the Pine Beetle. We need a week or two at -40C (fun fact, -40C is roughly equal to -40F) to really thin them out. We haven't been getting that cold weather, so large numbers of them make it through the winter, and then ravage the trees. It's related to the dramatic increase of forest fires in Western Canada, because dead trees dry out, provide little coverage to the area they're in (which lets the area dry further), and then burn very easily. All it takes is a lightening strike or some idiot deciding to violate a burn-ban, and then everything goes up. I've heard the warm weather has led to a "tick-pocalypse" and resurgence of ticks and mosquitoes, particularly on Ontario and Quebec. I don't know about termites, but wouldn't be surprised if the warm weather is doing a poor job suppressing them.
mikorym 7y ago
For the purposes of storing carbon, I don't think we'll get away from the fact that a large amount the carbon from fossil fuels that we have burned will likely have to be stored under ground again eventually. I find it strange to think about wooden buildings made out of pine; pine is an invasive species in Southern Africa. The effect of for example eucalyptus on the topsoil layer is as bad as full scale agricultural tilling. There is an argument that agriculture is a better future for this part of the world and there would certainly need to be better options here than wooden buildings. Maybe some sort of carbon polymer concrete mixture?
- quixoticelixer- 7y ago
  > The effect of for example eucalyptus on the topsoil layer is as bad as full scale agricultural tilling. In what way, do you have a source? I very much doubt this is true.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    Eucalypts are known to not be great for topsoil quality, degrading and depleting soil (especially as they're not nutrient fixers): > In a forest environment, SOM originates mainly from litterfall and litter decomposition. It is well known that the litter quality of eucalypts is low (Woods 1974). Eucalypt leaf litter contains large amounts of phenolics (Bernhard-Reversat et al. 2001) which are antibiotic and anti-feeding agent for invertebrate and vertebrate fauna (Waterman and Mole 1994; Harborne 1997). Eucalypt litter quality leads to low biological activity and results in a low litter decomposition rate in eucalypt plantations. The result of using eucalypts is definitely mixed at best (https://www.aimspress.com/fileOther/PDF/agriculture/agrfood-01-00175.pdf https://www.aimspress.com/fileOther/PDF/agriculture/agrfood-...) but at the end GP is probably excessive, eucalypts are inferior to almost any other tree species for soil quality but they're not as bad as agricultural land: > Our results indicate that soils in eucalyptus stands surrounding Ethiopian Orthodox church forests are more acidic and Eucalyptus may have some additional drawbacks that are not considered in this study. Though increased levels of organic matter should function have lower levels of organic matter and nutrients than soils in adjacent indigenous forest. However, there is also evidence that eucalyptus plantations exhibit higher organic matter and nutrient levels in comparison to nearby agricultural land, and no significant decrease in soil pH.
dirtyid 7y ago
Most small residential buildings in NA are already using relatively climate friendly dimensional lumber so the question is, are large wooden building a solution for climate change. The answer looks like yes, but there are a lot of toxic pollutants involved in engineered wood products, the kind of large wood members needed in large scale construction. I haven't found much research into the subject, a lot of existing literature is from the industry. Partly because it might genuinely be the defacto future building material, partly because the market is ready since sand scarcity is going to be a problem for concrete in the future.
- Bootwizard 7y ago
  What about recycled plastic? I've seen parks use it well for durable bridges, benches, gazebos, etc. For some reason I haven't seen it used for homes and that confuses me. It seems like a generally durable and even weatherproof material.
  - dirtyid 7y ago
    Not for structural use, which engineered wood is good replacement for concrete. Mybe some exterior cladding applications where there's already a lot of plastic products, I know some exist with recycled plastic but they seem pretty niche. Performance requirements for habitable environments (insulation, moisture control, outgassing/toxcity in fires etc) is different from outdoor use. It's probably down to process cost and scale, and the regulation around construction is generally pretty conservative.
- brohee 7y ago
  The point of CLT is that it contains only 1% of a not so bad adhesive (polyurethane) and 99% wood, vs e.g. MDF that contains 10% of a pretty bad adhesive...
  - dirtyid 7y ago
    In context climate change, it's more apt to compare effects of substituting concrete for CLT. The PUR / polyurethane adhesive is "no bad" in the sense that there's no toxic formaldehyde for people, but production of the adhesives still has heavy health and emissions risks - according to some Finish Building Science thesis I read a few years ago. As for MDF, since its is upcycled industrial wood residuals, it's going to be more economical as a byproduct of CLT popularity. Would probably be more wasteful to not use it. I'm a big believer in engineered wood, intuitively it seems like the way to go, there's just not much literature on it in terms of emission life cycle assessment in building science literature. Then again I haven't read up in a few years and interest in them have exploded outside of niche architecture and building circles.
hristov 7y ago
If you are seriously considering using building materials for carbon storage the best would be bamboo. It grows incredibly fast so that it soaks up carbon fast. However we would need more R&D to make the manufacture of bamboo building materials more environmentally friendly. Currently this Involves just soaking he bamboo in a lot of glue.
- abyssin 7y ago
  Machining bamboo is also harder on the tools because of its high silicate content.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    It's still wood though. That's basically butter compared to most materials that get featured in the same sentence as the word "machine" being used as a verb.
    - duckymcduckface 7y ago
      There's a lot more of it though, you'd need to compare bamboo to other woods to have a fair comparison.
      - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
        I disagree. There are two groups of people who will care about the difference in hardness and silicate content. The first is people doing fine precision woodworking. Those people stick to traditional hardwoods so it's a non issue. The second group is the people who are putting saw blades on angle grinders and stacking dado blades on circular saws or other activities that make work more expedient but tend to result in lots of pearl clutching when discussed in polite company. These people depend in part on the softness of the pine they usually work with in order for their preferred techniques to work and will grumble about having to change their techniques for bamboo or any other harder material. Everyone else who is not working at the limit of their materials and their tools will just shrug their shoulders and say the only difference they notice is that you gotta push the saw a little harder. You can cut steel with a run of the mill carbide tipped plywood blade on a circular saw. The HSS family of tool steels used in woodworking applications have no problem cutting aluminum. Woodworking tools are completely capable of cutting anything in the wood and composite spectrum Seriously, bamboo is not going to be any more of an issue than modern wood composites. You might suffer a slight reduction in work speed and blade life but that's par for the course when working in harder material and is basically a non-issue. The dust it generates and the propensity of the plastics to melt instead of cut is the main concern with compose building materials. Working with them is basically no different than wood.
southerntofu 7y ago
There is not single isolated solution to climate change. A wooden house can be a solution if you have abundant wood nearby, which is not the case everywhere. The problem is the industrialization of everything and the urban consumerist way of life. Ikea furniture is made of wood yet they're terrible for the environment because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China, filled of fire-repellent chemicals (among others) and is not very strong because it's low-quality wood (made from throw-away pieces hacked together with glue). So your piece of furniture brings a lot of pollution and is not gonna last, compared to hand-crafted furniture (out of real wood). The same goes for housing. People have been building houses out of straw and mud for thousands of years. Where you have wood, you'll build a solid base structure out of it and make big houses. When you don't, you'll just make a smaller one (< 15m²). Made a few myself, and these houses are way better than concrete houses: < 1000€ to build, fresh in summer, warm in winter.. But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. We should stop listening to these "Green capitalism" and other profiting vampires, and build our actual autonomy before this industrial civilization collapses.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  > But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. Wait, how so? Dense urban living is the sustainable alternative, if anything.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    I always thought that but although half the worlds population lives in cities they are responsible for 70% of the worlds emissions. I guess people in cities are richer so consume more.
    - southerntofu 7y ago
      We also have to take into account how our society destroyed local communities and economies. People on the countryside now depend a lot more on the global economy/industry than they did a few decades back, because local production was dis-incentivized by surrounding economical structures. Take for example food. When you're on the countryside, it's not complicated to produce more than 90% of what you eat locally (up to 100% for people willing to give up on some spices, oil and other products not grown locally). What makes it complicated is that local farms were coalesced into big industries based on monoculture (which itself destroys the environment) so the food produced on the countryside doesn't feed people locally but serves as a source for big corporations to make derived products (usually less nutritive and bad for health) which rural and urban people alike will go buy in the supermarket (because there is usually no more alternative). So i agree the current numbers don't reflect that so much, because of the self-perpetuating circle of heteronomy imposed by capitalism. But living on the countryside relying on local production is way more eco-friendly than any industrial civilization could ever be.
myspy 7y ago
We are currently building a home made of cross-laminated timber as inner walls. The outer wall are covered by a wood construction that is filled with wood fiber to insulate. The carpenter ordered the walls in Austria and they set everything up in three days. The outer walls and the roof were pre-fabricated too and delivered in parts. Really crazy. The house smells pretty good with all the wood, let's see how the climate will be when we live in it.
- clows 7y ago
  Which company did you order from? I'm from Austria myself and thinking about building with timber walls.
  - myspy 7y ago
    The carpenter we did choose ordered here http://www.clt.info/ http://www.clt.info/ Walls in the hallway and storage rooms are left exposed as well as one wall in the kids rooms. The living and sleeping rooms are covered by clayslabs and in-between the electrical cables are placed. Everything is plastered then with clay“stuff“. We hope that clay will help to control the climate. The cables are put through the walls to install switches in the hallways.
- CannisterFlux 7y ago
  > The house smells pretty good with all the wood I hope you like it because that smell will take a long time to fade and will be your new cologne :) My parents used to live in a wooden house. Even 10+ years after they built it whenever I'd visit for a few days my suitcase and clothes all smelled of wood afterwards.
- hawski 7y ago
  My little big dream is to build a small multitenant building with CLT. For around 4 families, one floor per apartment. Then sell 3 apartments to fund building more and move in one left. Have you left wood exposed in interior? How does it work for cabling and hooks for pictures and furniture? Where is your house? Did costs were lower than with typical technology around your location? For me a big plus is what you mentioned, that it is very quick, that certainly helps to keep costs and the risk lower.
deleted 7y ago
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lmilcin 7y ago
I don't see anything surprising. To remove carbon from atmosphere it must be sequestered. Sequestration means it is no longer available to go back to the atmosphere. It means it can no longer be part of cycle of life, it must be removed and prevented from getting back in the cycle. The reason we have more carbon in atmosphere is not that we have felled trees but that we have dug out a bunch of carbon (coal, oil, gas) that for a long time was not taking part in the cycle. What is surprising is that supposedly intelligent people still don't get the basic facts right.
- ramblerman 7y ago
  I think intelligent people generally avoid the hubris of thinking they fully understand a complex multi variate problem by holding on to one variable
  - lmilcin 7y ago
    This is not a complex multi variate problem. There are two flows of carbon to our atmosphere (and oceans). One flow is cyclic which means carbon involved in the proces is just changing form constantly but the total amount of it stays relatively constant as it is the same carbon just changing form. The only way this process could alter atmospheric CO2 is if amount of biomass drastically changed. It can't cause infinite rise of atmospheric CO2 as the amount of biomass is finite and relatively small. Even if you burned all biomass and converted it to CO2 it would just dissolve in our oceans causing slight acidification as oceans have capability to dissolve more CO2 than our entire biomass in circulation. There is not enough biomass on Earth to cause long term rise in atmospheric CO2 unless another mechanism is present. The second flow is steady addition of carbon from outside the cycle, from fossilized stores. This carbon has been unavailable for hundreds of millions of years since times when our atmosphere was very different from todays. Every molecule dug out from sequestered stores ends up in the atmosphere as addition, causing steady rise in CO2. Oceans have only limited ability to buffer long term flows of CO2.
boyadjian 7y ago
There is no solution to climate change. Climate change will occur, whatever we do. Human activity is polluting, it's inevitable. To avoid climate change, we should have listened to the Club of Rome, in 1972, when they published "the limits to growth". We should have installed a Malthusian politic, to avoid high birth rates. Now it is much too late.
- icebraining 7y ago
  An article I read recently talked about how the famous Toyota production system (which inspired agile and such) actually refers to countermeasures, not solutions. Seems rather appropriate to our current conversations about climate change. https://leadingtransformation.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/addressing-problems-with-countermeasures-rather-than-solutions/ https://leadingtransformation.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/addre...
  - boyadjian 7y ago
    The house is on fire, the house is burning, and humanity is throwing more gasoline on it. Every countermeasure we will find will be ridiculous.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
Silhouette 7y ago
The use of wood in building has some clear advantages, for sure, particularly as engineered timber improves. At the same time, there are also issues of robustness to consider. If you're only building a house that might last for a few decades, you need to consider what happens to the building materials at the end of its useful life. More than that, depending on your environment, you need to consider risks that might cause either a premature end to that useful life or a degradation of performance over time. For example, here in the UK, we don't get a lot of really bad storms of the kind that central America sees, but we do get storms strong enough to cause major structural damage from time to time, and the rate is expected to increase for a while due to the changing environmental conditions. The kinds of insulated panels used for a lot of timber frame construction today have many good points, but being about as robust as tissue paper in the face of fast-moving debris flying around outside your house in a bad storm is not one of them. There's not much point planning the environmental credentials of a new building over, say, a 50-60 year assumed lifetime if in reality the expected time before being seriously damaged in a bad storm is only half that. You also have to consider the possibilities for timber elements changing shape over time, which in turn can reduce the overall thermal efficiency of a building, allow damaging pests to get in, increase sound transmission, or even in severe cases reduce fire containment or compromise structural integrity entirely. We have very changeable seasons here: as it happens, we're reaching all-time high temperatures of nearly 40C as I'm writing this, but we also have lows in the same areas that can push towards -10C or even -20C. That's a lot of expansion and contraction, and while again engineered timber has significant advantages over solid planks and the like, you do have to consider these kinds of issues as well. Again, none of this is to say that using more timber in our construction doesn't have some big advantages. We just need to be a little cautious, because there might also be risks, and so far we have relatively little experience with some of these newer timber-based construction techniques to fully evaluate them.
emanuensis 7y ago
Hemp? Long history of industrial usages (before prohibition) An excellent material for engineering. Grows anywhere, fast, a good greenifier.

128 points by oori 7y ago

oori 7y ago

Very interesting article. Quote: Many pine trees in managed forests, such as the European spruce, take roughly 80 years to reach maturity, being net absorbers of carbon during those years of growth – but once they reach maturity, they shed roughly as much carbon through the decomposition of needles and fallen branches as they absorb. As was the case in Austria in the 1990s, plummeting demand for paper and wood saw huge swathes of managed forests globally fall into disuse. Rather than return to pristine wilderness, these monocrops cover forest floors in acidic pine needles and dead branches. Canada's great forests for example have actually emitted more carbon than they absorb since 2001, thanks to mature trees no longer being actively felled. Arguably, the best form of carbon sequestration is to chop down trees: to restore our sustainable, managed forests, and use the resulting wood as a building material. Managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) typically plant two to three trees for every tree felled – meaning the more demand there is for wood, the greater the growth in both forest cover and CO2-hungry young trees.

mrob 7y ago
Even if there's no demand for wood, the trees should still be harvested because they can be pyrolized to produce fuel gas/oil and biochar. About 50% of the carbon can be converted to biochar, which is both a valuable soil amendment and a way to long-term sequester carbon such that it can't be easily extracted. And the carbon released by burning the remainder would have been released to the atmosphere away as the trees decayed, so it's better it does something useful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
- YayamiOmate 7y ago
  Do you say its an efficient battery for solar power?
  - mrob 7y ago
    My guess is probably not, because photosynthesis is not very efficient. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency But if the trees are already grown then I think we should use them, and not just leave them to rot.
quixoticelixer- 7y ago
That's not quite true, it takes a lot longer than 80 years for forests to stop sequestering CO2, even for fast growing species.
- ARandomerDude 7y ago
  I don't think that was the argument. OP was saying after maturity the scales tip to being net emitters.
  - quixoticelixer- 7y ago
    They don't really ever change to be net emmitters, and it takes a long time for them to stop absorbing carbon ( a few hundred years)
    - benj111 7y ago
      Do you have a source? Because you're directly contradicting the article.
      - aukust 7y ago
        Anecdotal evidence suggests to me that European spruce stores more CO2 than it sheds way over 80 years old as a spruce grows in mass significantly decades after reaching that age. However here is a study that tries to bring some light to carbon pools on over-mature 167-213 year-old trees: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/435/pdf https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4907/9/7/435/pdf
        bryanlarsen 7y ago
        Anecdotal evidence tells me that spruce trees are really good at suppressing undergrowth due to their acidic needless so claiming a mature first is a net emitter makes sense to me. The trees may be growing, but nothing else is.
      - quixoticelixer- 7y ago
YayamiOmate 7y ago
Its an obvious tautology to me. If you allow decomposition then obvioisly net must be zero. If you createa object and destroy it, it pretty much has to release its source material in some form. If tree stops growing it obviously has to have zero net. Anything absorbing anything has either to store it - grow, or release it in some form. Carbon is element, what are the options? Store it permanently, transform chemically and release, or transform it atomically and change the element but tree is not a nuclear plant.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  As long as it's wood, it's emission negative
mistrial9 7y ago
.. it is not "plummeting demand" .. it is a bump in the massive consumption growth curve of the modern age.. aside from that, all paths need to be considered.
mywittyname 7y ago
Governments should pay to have the mature trees harvested, then tossed into some body of water, and eventually covered with dirt. At that point, the carbon sequestration will last for a 1000+ years. Should demand ever increase, then the felled trees could be reharvested, cured, then used as normal.

BurningFrog 7y ago

The understanding that "captured carbon" is mostly just another word for "wood" is sadly rare.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

I believe wooden building of the sort described in the article can be a solution to climate change, in the normally understood usage of the word solution, if combined with a time machine.

jonwinstanley 7y ago
Agreed, time machine is probably the only hope. Now that we have melted large parts of polar permafrost and the arctic is on fire, "fixing" climate change is not really possible. More about coming to terms with what we've done and how to cope with the new world we have created. My bet, it won't be pretty.

benrbray 7y ago

Also briefly discussed on a recent episode of 99% invisible: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-on-sand/

murukesh_s 7y ago

Also there is ventilation/cooling aspect for wooden houses which works favourably in tropical climates, especially when used in roofing. Not sure about its effect on colder climates.

eitland 7y ago
It works really well in colder climates as well. In fact I guess the overwhelming majority of homes outside the city centers in Norway are wooden houses.
- markdown 7y ago
  And in Japan.
- stareatgoats 7y ago
  According to our local carpenter the wooden houses in Scandinavia are rapidly deteriorating because of the increase in temperature. His take is that wooden houses need a long cold spell in winter in order to slow down the attack by tree-eating organisms during summer. Could be depending on the widespread usage of fir trees for house-building, other types of trees may be more resilient to warm climates.
  - benj111 7y ago
    What kind of organisms? My experience of older mainland European houses is southern France. All the floor beams are made of ancient gnarly woodworm eaten hard wood, but it only really affects the outer cm of wood. So I wonder if the problem is partially newer building techniques, thinner cut wood, less dense wood?
    - blaser-waffle 7y ago
      If Scandinavia is anything like Canada, the Pine Beetle. We need a week or two at -40C (fun fact, -40C is roughly equal to -40F) to really thin them out. We haven't been getting that cold weather, so large numbers of them make it through the winter, and then ravage the trees. It's related to the dramatic increase of forest fires in Western Canada, because dead trees dry out, provide little coverage to the area they're in (which lets the area dry further), and then burn very easily. All it takes is a lightening strike or some idiot deciding to violate a burn-ban, and then everything goes up. I've heard the warm weather has led to a "tick-pocalypse" and resurgence of ticks and mosquitoes, particularly on Ontario and Quebec. I don't know about termites, but wouldn't be surprised if the warm weather is doing a poor job suppressing them.

mikorym 7y ago

For the purposes of storing carbon, I don't think we'll get away from the fact that a large amount the carbon from fossil fuels that we have burned will likely have to be stored under ground again eventually. I find it strange to think about wooden buildings made out of pine; pine is an invasive species in Southern Africa. The effect of for example eucalyptus on the topsoil layer is as bad as full scale agricultural tilling. There is an argument that agriculture is a better future for this part of the world and there would certainly need to be better options here than wooden buildings. Maybe some sort of carbon polymer concrete mixture?

quixoticelixer- 7y ago
> The effect of for example eucalyptus on the topsoil layer is as bad as full scale agricultural tilling. In what way, do you have a source? I very much doubt this is true.
- masklinn 7y ago
  Eucalypts are known to not be great for topsoil quality, degrading and depleting soil (especially as they're not nutrient fixers): > In a forest environment, SOM originates mainly from litterfall and litter decomposition. It is well known that the litter quality of eucalypts is low (Woods 1974). Eucalypt leaf litter contains large amounts of phenolics (Bernhard-Reversat et al. 2001) which are antibiotic and anti-feeding agent for invertebrate and vertebrate fauna (Waterman and Mole 1994; Harborne 1997). Eucalypt litter quality leads to low biological activity and results in a low litter decomposition rate in eucalypt plantations. The result of using eucalypts is definitely mixed at best (https://www.aimspress.com/fileOther/PDF/agriculture/agrfood-01-00175.pdf https://www.aimspress.com/fileOther/PDF/agriculture/agrfood-...) but at the end GP is probably excessive, eucalypts are inferior to almost any other tree species for soil quality but they're not as bad as agricultural land: > Our results indicate that soils in eucalyptus stands surrounding Ethiopian Orthodox church forests are more acidic and Eucalyptus may have some additional drawbacks that are not considered in this study. Though increased levels of organic matter should function have lower levels of organic matter and nutrients than soils in adjacent indigenous forest. However, there is also evidence that eucalyptus plantations exhibit higher organic matter and nutrient levels in comparison to nearby agricultural land, and no significant decrease in soil pH.

dirtyid 7y ago

Most small residential buildings in NA are already using relatively climate friendly dimensional lumber so the question is, are large wooden building a solution for climate change. The answer looks like yes, but there are a lot of toxic pollutants involved in engineered wood products, the kind of large wood members needed in large scale construction. I haven't found much research into the subject, a lot of existing literature is from the industry. Partly because it might genuinely be the defacto future building material, partly because the market is ready since sand scarcity is going to be a problem for concrete in the future.

Bootwizard 7y ago
What about recycled plastic? I've seen parks use it well for durable bridges, benches, gazebos, etc. For some reason I haven't seen it used for homes and that confuses me. It seems like a generally durable and even weatherproof material.
- dirtyid 7y ago
  Not for structural use, which engineered wood is good replacement for concrete. Mybe some exterior cladding applications where there's already a lot of plastic products, I know some exist with recycled plastic but they seem pretty niche. Performance requirements for habitable environments (insulation, moisture control, outgassing/toxcity in fires etc) is different from outdoor use. It's probably down to process cost and scale, and the regulation around construction is generally pretty conservative.
brohee 7y ago
The point of CLT is that it contains only 1% of a not so bad adhesive (polyurethane) and 99% wood, vs e.g. MDF that contains 10% of a pretty bad adhesive...
- dirtyid 7y ago
  In context climate change, it's more apt to compare effects of substituting concrete for CLT. The PUR / polyurethane adhesive is "no bad" in the sense that there's no toxic formaldehyde for people, but production of the adhesives still has heavy health and emissions risks - according to some Finish Building Science thesis I read a few years ago. As for MDF, since its is upcycled industrial wood residuals, it's going to be more economical as a byproduct of CLT popularity. Would probably be more wasteful to not use it. I'm a big believer in engineered wood, intuitively it seems like the way to go, there's just not much literature on it in terms of emission life cycle assessment in building science literature. Then again I haven't read up in a few years and interest in them have exploded outside of niche architecture and building circles.

hristov 7y ago

If you are seriously considering using building materials for carbon storage the best would be bamboo. It grows incredibly fast so that it soaks up carbon fast. However we would need more R&D to make the manufacture of bamboo building materials more environmentally friendly. Currently this Involves just soaking he bamboo in a lot of glue.

abyssin 7y ago
Machining bamboo is also harder on the tools because of its high silicate content.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  It's still wood though. That's basically butter compared to most materials that get featured in the same sentence as the word "machine" being used as a verb.
  - duckymcduckface 7y ago
    There's a lot more of it though, you'd need to compare bamboo to other woods to have a fair comparison.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      I disagree. There are two groups of people who will care about the difference in hardness and silicate content. The first is people doing fine precision woodworking. Those people stick to traditional hardwoods so it's a non issue. The second group is the people who are putting saw blades on angle grinders and stacking dado blades on circular saws or other activities that make work more expedient but tend to result in lots of pearl clutching when discussed in polite company. These people depend in part on the softness of the pine they usually work with in order for their preferred techniques to work and will grumble about having to change their techniques for bamboo or any other harder material. Everyone else who is not working at the limit of their materials and their tools will just shrug their shoulders and say the only difference they notice is that you gotta push the saw a little harder. You can cut steel with a run of the mill carbide tipped plywood blade on a circular saw. The HSS family of tool steels used in woodworking applications have no problem cutting aluminum. Woodworking tools are completely capable of cutting anything in the wood and composite spectrum Seriously, bamboo is not going to be any more of an issue than modern wood composites. You might suffer a slight reduction in work speed and blade life but that's par for the course when working in harder material and is basically a non-issue. The dust it generates and the propensity of the plastics to melt instead of cut is the main concern with compose building materials. Working with them is basically no different than wood.

southerntofu 7y ago

There is not single isolated solution to climate change. A wooden house can be a solution if you have abundant wood nearby, which is not the case everywhere. The problem is the industrialization of everything and the urban consumerist way of life. Ikea furniture is made of wood yet they're terrible for the environment because the wood comes from far away, is usually assembled in China, filled of fire-repellent chemicals (among others) and is not very strong because it's low-quality wood (made from throw-away pieces hacked together with glue). So your piece of furniture brings a lot of pollution and is not gonna last, compared to hand-crafted furniture (out of real wood). The same goes for housing. People have been building houses out of straw and mud for thousands of years. Where you have wood, you'll build a solid base structure out of it and make big houses. When you don't, you'll just make a smaller one (< 15m²). Made a few myself, and these houses are way better than concrete houses: < 1000€ to build, fresh in summer, warm in winter.. But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. We should stop listening to these "Green capitalism" and other profiting vampires, and build our actual autonomy before this industrial civilization collapses.

Sharlin 7y ago
> But the ultimate solution is to stop the madness of trying to pile up people in huge metal/concrete towers. I too love the comfort of the city and meeting many people but it is not a sustainable way of life and will never be. Wait, how so? Dense urban living is the sustainable alternative, if anything.
- tonyedgecombe 7y ago
  I always thought that but although half the worlds population lives in cities they are responsible for 70% of the worlds emissions. I guess people in cities are richer so consume more.
  - southerntofu 7y ago
    We also have to take into account how our society destroyed local communities and economies. People on the countryside now depend a lot more on the global economy/industry than they did a few decades back, because local production was dis-incentivized by surrounding economical structures. Take for example food. When you're on the countryside, it's not complicated to produce more than 90% of what you eat locally (up to 100% for people willing to give up on some spices, oil and other products not grown locally). What makes it complicated is that local farms were coalesced into big industries based on monoculture (which itself destroys the environment) so the food produced on the countryside doesn't feed people locally but serves as a source for big corporations to make derived products (usually less nutritive and bad for health) which rural and urban people alike will go buy in the supermarket (because there is usually no more alternative). So i agree the current numbers don't reflect that so much, because of the self-perpetuating circle of heteronomy imposed by capitalism. But living on the countryside relying on local production is way more eco-friendly than any industrial civilization could ever be.

myspy 7y ago

We are currently building a home made of cross-laminated timber as inner walls. The outer wall are covered by a wood construction that is filled with wood fiber to insulate. The carpenter ordered the walls in Austria and they set everything up in three days. The outer walls and the roof were pre-fabricated too and delivered in parts. Really crazy. The house smells pretty good with all the wood, let's see how the climate will be when we live in it.

clows 7y ago
Which company did you order from? I'm from Austria myself and thinking about building with timber walls.
- myspy 7y ago
  The carpenter we did choose ordered here http://www.clt.info/ http://www.clt.info/ Walls in the hallway and storage rooms are left exposed as well as one wall in the kids rooms. The living and sleeping rooms are covered by clayslabs and in-between the electrical cables are placed. Everything is plastered then with clay“stuff“. We hope that clay will help to control the climate. The cables are put through the walls to install switches in the hallways.
CannisterFlux 7y ago
> The house smells pretty good with all the wood I hope you like it because that smell will take a long time to fade and will be your new cologne :) My parents used to live in a wooden house. Even 10+ years after they built it whenever I'd visit for a few days my suitcase and clothes all smelled of wood afterwards.
hawski 7y ago
My little big dream is to build a small multitenant building with CLT. For around 4 families, one floor per apartment. Then sell 3 apartments to fund building more and move in one left. Have you left wood exposed in interior? How does it work for cabling and hooks for pictures and furniture? Where is your house? Did costs were lower than with typical technology around your location? For me a big plus is what you mentioned, that it is very quick, that certainly helps to keep costs and the risk lower.

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lmilcin 7y ago

I don't see anything surprising. To remove carbon from atmosphere it must be sequestered. Sequestration means it is no longer available to go back to the atmosphere. It means it can no longer be part of cycle of life, it must be removed and prevented from getting back in the cycle. The reason we have more carbon in atmosphere is not that we have felled trees but that we have dug out a bunch of carbon (coal, oil, gas) that for a long time was not taking part in the cycle. What is surprising is that supposedly intelligent people still don't get the basic facts right.

ramblerman 7y ago
I think intelligent people generally avoid the hubris of thinking they fully understand a complex multi variate problem by holding on to one variable
- lmilcin 7y ago
  This is not a complex multi variate problem. There are two flows of carbon to our atmosphere (and oceans). One flow is cyclic which means carbon involved in the proces is just changing form constantly but the total amount of it stays relatively constant as it is the same carbon just changing form. The only way this process could alter atmospheric CO2 is if amount of biomass drastically changed. It can't cause infinite rise of atmospheric CO2 as the amount of biomass is finite and relatively small. Even if you burned all biomass and converted it to CO2 it would just dissolve in our oceans causing slight acidification as oceans have capability to dissolve more CO2 than our entire biomass in circulation. There is not enough biomass on Earth to cause long term rise in atmospheric CO2 unless another mechanism is present. The second flow is steady addition of carbon from outside the cycle, from fossilized stores. This carbon has been unavailable for hundreds of millions of years since times when our atmosphere was very different from todays. Every molecule dug out from sequestered stores ends up in the atmosphere as addition, causing steady rise in CO2. Oceans have only limited ability to buffer long term flows of CO2.

boyadjian 7y ago

There is no solution to climate change. Climate change will occur, whatever we do. Human activity is polluting, it's inevitable. To avoid climate change, we should have listened to the Club of Rome, in 1972, when they published "the limits to growth". We should have installed a Malthusian politic, to avoid high birth rates. Now it is much too late.

icebraining 7y ago
An article I read recently talked about how the famous Toyota production system (which inspired agile and such) actually refers to countermeasures, not solutions. Seems rather appropriate to our current conversations about climate change. https://leadingtransformation.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/addressing-problems-with-countermeasures-rather-than-solutions/ https://leadingtransformation.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/addre...
- boyadjian 7y ago
  The house is on fire, the house is burning, and humanity is throwing more gasoline on it. Every countermeasure we will find will be ridiculous.
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Silhouette 7y ago

The use of wood in building has some clear advantages, for sure, particularly as engineered timber improves. At the same time, there are also issues of robustness to consider. If you're only building a house that might last for a few decades, you need to consider what happens to the building materials at the end of its useful life. More than that, depending on your environment, you need to consider risks that might cause either a premature end to that useful life or a degradation of performance over time. For example, here in the UK, we don't get a lot of really bad storms of the kind that central America sees, but we do get storms strong enough to cause major structural damage from time to time, and the rate is expected to increase for a while due to the changing environmental conditions. The kinds of insulated panels used for a lot of timber frame construction today have many good points, but being about as robust as tissue paper in the face of fast-moving debris flying around outside your house in a bad storm is not one of them. There's not much point planning the environmental credentials of a new building over, say, a 50-60 year assumed lifetime if in reality the expected time before being seriously damaged in a bad storm is only half that. You also have to consider the possibilities for timber elements changing shape over time, which in turn can reduce the overall thermal efficiency of a building, allow damaging pests to get in, increase sound transmission, or even in severe cases reduce fire containment or compromise structural integrity entirely. We have very changeable seasons here: as it happens, we're reaching all-time high temperatures of nearly 40C as I'm writing this, but we also have lows in the same areas that can push towards -10C or even -20C. That's a lot of expansion and contraction, and while again engineered timber has significant advantages over solid planks and the like, you do have to consider these kinds of issues as well. Again, none of this is to say that using more timber in our construction doesn't have some big advantages. We just need to be a little cautious, because there might also be risks, and so far we have relatively little experience with some of these newer timber-based construction techniques to fully evaluate them.

emanuensis 7y ago

Hemp? Long history of industrial usages (before prohibition) An excellent material for engineering. Grows anywhere, fast, a good greenifier.