Got Wood?

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Many providers of utilities and such, have moved away from paper bills and statements, to emailed ones, in order to save the trees

At the same time, the packaging industry is moving away from single use plastic to cardboard in order to save the oceans

Sooner or later, someone will discover a way to make consumable items out of dolphins, and the farce will continue

Have you noticed how many companies are adding the word ‘Sustainable’ to everything they do? And everyone wants to be seen as carbon neutral

Including the Guardian, of course

What they don’t see, is that in the same way one company ditches paper bills while another turns to cardboard boxes, there’s a huge elephant in this room

It’s renewable, strong as steel, astonishingly fireproof – yet it’s easy and quiet to build with. Could timber construction be the future? We step inside the revolutionary new London workplace that everyone wants to touch

So assuming all that is true, it may be better to build with, but this is the Guardian. Is it carbon neutral?

(For the purposes of this post, the carbon we are discussing is not the solid type, the building blocks of human life and the stuff that deposits itself in your engine, reducing performace over the years. It’s actually the gas, Carbon Dioxide. But you already knew that)

In architecture, the focus has long been on reducing the amount of energy a building consumes once it is occupied – known as operational carbon – but the bigger factor comes much earlier in the process. Up to three-quarters of a building’s total emissions over its lifespan come not from leaving the lights on and cranking up the thermostat but from the energy consumed in the production of the materials used to build it – known as embodied carbon. That, much of the industry now finally agrees, is where efforts must be focused to avert climate catastrophe.

Climate catastrophe? LOL!

So it’s the construction process that creates the bulk of the carbon (dioxide)? And if you build with wood, you don’t create all the carbon (dioxide) necessary to make the steel and concrete you would otherwise be using?

In an unassuming alleyway in Shoreditch, east London, stands a new office block that boasts few of the shiny gimmicks of its bloated glass and steel neighbours a few streets away in the Square Mile. But building it used almost 40% less carbon than comparable structures – primarily because it’s made of wood

The article goes on quite convincingly, so explain how wood is a good product to use for construction and doesn’t really have the downsides tyou would expect, including this:

Such is the principle behind structural mass timber. With sheets of wood laminated together, like supersized plywood, it is designed with “sacrificial” outer layers that would char in the event of a fire, protecting the inner structural integrity. Waugh shows me a historic photograph of a fire-ravaged building, where the steel beams have melted and collapsed, drooping like spaghetti over a charred wooden beam that remains intact and structurally sound.

 

Kind of scuppers the idea that jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams, eh? 

Anyhoo, back on topic. So the building creates 40% less carbon (dioxide) during construction than a standard building, which makes it better for the environment, yes?

Where does wood come from? – Trees

What do trees do? – Absorb carbon dioxide

So have they taken into account the carbon (dioxide) that won’t be absorbed over the life times of the trees you cut down?

Have they fuck. May as well have built it out of dolphins