
Could wooden building be a solution to climate change? - oori
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190717-climate-change-wooden-architecture-concrete-global-warming
======
oori
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.

~~~
quixoticelixer-
That's not quite true, it takes a lot longer than 80 years for forests to stop
sequestering CO2, even for fast growing species.

~~~
lmilcin
"On average", no forest produces or consumes any CO2 or O2 unless the biomass
is somehow sequestered, for example buried under volcanic ash or on the bottom
of anoxic lake which would typically prevent it from decomposing.

The forest binds some amount of carbon and oxygen for a time being but then it
is released back when it burns or decomposes, etc. It is really insignificant
when compared with steady flow of carbon from fossil fuels.

~~~
bluGill
That isn't completely true. A well managed forest will sequester some carbon
when it burns. Note well managed in there, that means a small fire every year,
a large fire gets hot enough to burn all the carbon, but a small fire will
burn only part of the carbon and leave the rest as charcoal. Moral: shoot
smokey the bear and let foresters start the fires they want to if only they
were allowed to.

Of course the above is a generalization, and as all of them false in some way.
Ask your local forester what applies to the forest in your area, but don't try
to apply it to a forest in the next neighborhood as that might be different.

~~~
lmilcin
To sequester carbon it would have to be prevented from decomposing. It is not
enough for the trees to turn to charcoal during fire. If what you said was
true "well managed" forest would be standing atop of layers of charcoal which
obviously is not true.

Instead what _I suspect_ happens is that the charcoal from fires weathers,
crumbles and becomes part of the soil. Soil is feed for other organisms.

~~~
bluGill
The charcoal is mixed in with soil, it is there.

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hristov
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.

~~~
ginko
Can't we just bury the bamboo?

~~~
hristov
The idea is to make the bamboo useful so farming it would be profitable.

~~~
rndgermandude
Use carbon taxes to pay bamboo framers to grow and the bury the bamboo. Or
whatever plant has the bast characteristics for this job.

Grow it, shred it, compact it, bury it.

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mikorym
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?

~~~
chr1
According to [1] the terrestrial biosphere contains 2000 gigatons of carbon
combined oil and gas reserves contain only 370 gigatons. 28% of earth surface
is taken by deserts, and if we simply restored ecosystem there it would take
560 gigatons of carbon. So we do not need to store any amount under ground, we
only need enough people to make irrigating deserts profitable.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle)

~~~
mikorym
You can't just create forests out of deserts, that is not exactly nature
conservation.

~~~
chr1
I do not want to conserve nature, i want to convert it to the form that is
useful for people.

~~~
s_kilk
The exact kind of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place.

~~~
chr1
If by "this mess" you mean civilisation in general, then yes, civilisation and
science have originated in places where people had to make large scale changes
to environment to survive (mesopotamia, egypt, etc.). But then "this mess" is
much better than the alternative of small tribes living as hunter gatherers,
until planet would run out of CO2 in 600mln years
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future)

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dirtyid
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.

~~~
brohee
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
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.

------
myspy
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
Which company did you order from? I'm from Austria myself and thinking about
building with timber walls.

~~~
myspy
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.

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

------
lmilcin
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
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
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.

------
benrbray
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
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
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.

~~~
stareatgoats
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
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
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.

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bryanrasmussen
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
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.

------
emanuensis
Hemp?

Long history of industrial usages (before prohibition)

An excellent material for engineering.

Grows anywhere, fast, a good greenifier.

------
Silhouette
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.

------
southerntofu
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
> 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
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
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.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Good points although I'm not sure we can put that genie back in the bottle,
the population is too high for subsistance farming now.

~~~
southerntofu
> the population is too high for subsistance farming now.

Is it, though? More than half of cultures are used for animal exploitation
(which most of the world could do without). It appears we currently have
around 2 football fields of cultivable land per person living on earth (though
this may change soon with the climate).

We also have to take into account that industrial farming and monocultures
kill the humus and dry off the land in the long run (over decades) making it
more and more sterile (requiring an ever greater dose of fertilizers to grow
anything and making the crops more sensitive to heatwaves).

Many serious agronomists (those not employed by the industry) insist not only
that another agriculture is possible, but that it's the only way to prevent
food shortages in the coming years (which will happen if we insist on
chemical-powered monocultures).

Also, a one-garden-per-person model is not the only way to grow locally. We
can of course share the land and the work. It just makes things a lot easier
when the population isn't so dense that you can't grow your own food locally
anymore (which is only the case with big cities).

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boyadjian
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
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/addre...](https://leadingtransformation.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/addressing-
problems-with-countermeasures-rather-than-solutions/)

~~~
boyadjian
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.

