"Hardened wood" = wood cellulose + glue
Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
171–180 of 282 posts
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point of using basswood as a reference is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the hardening process by using a very soft wood. Separately, basswood is fairly quick growing, making it a decent candidate for commercialization of the whole technology.
Not really "separately", pretty much as a rule hardwoods grow very slowly. Pretty much any fast growing wood is going to be soft.
Basswood is a hardwood because it's a flowering tree (angiosperm); softwoods come from conifers (gymnosperms).
Balsa is a hardwood, too.
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 us…
Because 20 million trees planted would offset US emissions by 2 days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqht2bIQXIY
I wonder if there's any legs in algae or seaweed. Wouldn't take up valuable land to grow and is fast growing.
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#174I'm sold. Where can I get some of this hardened wood? I would like to experiment with it and maybe incorporate it into products.
I have a tiny bit of advice I might be able to lend here, for experimentation purposes mainly. Regular hardwood can be heat-treated to increase its density and compression strength considerably, in the most basic form this can be done at home by heating it... slowly ... up to ~400F (typically just holding it over a hot-plate until it's light-medium brown. You'll want a temperature-stable oven for wood more than a cm…
Yeah... I don't want to make this stuff, I want to use this stuff.
It would be great to get an understanding of its performance specs. I may be able to specify hardened wood in place of steel, aluminum, magnesium machined parts in high-end ecologically conscious consumer products... but not without some understanding of the engineering specifications and a source of material.
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#175Wood 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…
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?
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...
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
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 ?
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.
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#177Wood 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…
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.
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.
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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-...
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.
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 us…
Because 20 million trees planted would offset US emissions by 2 days. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqht2bIQXIY
But I can’t tell if 20 million trees is a lot or a little.
Re: Hardened wood as a renewable alternative to steel and plastic
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
The biggest problem with CLT and other engineered wood beams is that it fails extremely quickly in a fire. I've heard firefighters talk about how their departments are considering scaling back entries on newer homes because those beams can fail so early in a fire when the binder fails.
This study disagrees with your claims. https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/pdf2012/fpl_2012_dagenais...
A study conducted by two fucking industry trade groups and the USDA Forest Products lab?
> FPInnovations is a private not-for-profit R&D organization that specializes in the creation of solutions that accelerate the growth of the Canadian forest sector and its affiliated industries to enhance their global competitiveness
Did you read the fucking introduction? It's an industry-paid-for shill study:
> Financial support for the development of this US edition of the CLT Handbook was provided by the Bi-National Softwood Council, US Forest Products Laboratory and Forest Innovation Investment. Financial support for conducting the fire resistance test series on cross-laminated timber (CLT) was provided by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) under the Transformative Technologies Program, which was created to identify and accelerate the development and introduction of products such as CLT in North America. FPInnovations expresses its thanks to its industry members Julie Frappier, Eng. from Nordic Engineered Wood and Andre Morf from Structurlam, Dr. Nourredine Bénichou of the National Research Council of Canada, NRCan (Canadian Forest Service), the Provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and the Yukon Territory for their continuing guidance and financial support.
I guess it must be the steel industry planting astroturfers in reddit comments pretending to be firefighters talking about how they're seeing new construction buildings with engineered structural wood fold stunningly fast, huh?