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Lol, this the world we live in now. Artificial trees. Next it’ll be artificial pollinated flowers and manufactured bees

https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/pollinating-orchards-by-hand-lessons-from-sichuan-china

Technology got us into this mess, and it’s our only hope.

Mechanical pollination is already a thing for a while now dude. People are already investing a lot of money for the technology to replace bees. In the future, we will "bend" nature, not the other way around.

Even stronger wood!? My floors are never gonna squeak or sag again!

And only 10x more expensive than real wood 😂

For now.

That is most certainly where humanity is going, killing all the species off and using scientific progress to keep us peddling while the natural beauty of the biosphere that is the earth dies a quick death.

Yes this will happen cause the trees and bees will all die bc we destroy their natural habitats for our pleasures.

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Um, it's not artificial trees. It's engineered wood. They remove the lignin from wood and replace it with synthetic particles. It makes it stronger.

Stronger wood means you could potentially use less of it in construction, which should be good for the environment.

Won't be much nature to bend though.

​

Will have to start calling everything Artificure

Would it be better in earthquakes?

oh no that's what came first - we've graduated to trees not the other way round bzzzz

off-gases? Toxicities?

Not to speak on the credibility or potential of this article, 'cancer cure' level headlines do come and go. But I agree, non-fossil fuel energies used to be wildly expensive and more impractical years ago, now solar and wind are close to among the cheapest. If engineered wood could be a viable option and replacement for razing forests one day, then why not?

Yes and…

Engineered wood really just means they take bits of wood that are all oriented in the right direction and then squeeze and glue those together. It means much less wood can have much more strength because most wood has knots or other bits that weaken it structurally so you have to over spec traditional lumber.

So it’s stronger and you need less of it.

Anyone gonna tell them? Or should I? You do know that real wood captures even more CO2 right?

vanilla has been artificially pollinated since an at the time slave (Edmond Albius) created a technique to artificially pollinate its flowers (when he was just 12 years old) which made the crop incredibly profitable afterwards

a lot of fruits grown in places without their natural pollinators are also artificially pollinated

The material they use to make it strong is vulnerable to water, so they put it in wood which likes to absorb moisture?

This'll probably be the cross-laminated wood bridges all over again. For those that don't know over in europe they tried making a bunch of bridges out of clw. They ended up collapsing not long after from regular traffic because moisture weakened the bridges.

Extra stringers needed for decking

w

It takes energy to manufacture said wood. The amount of energy needed is likely much, much more than the CO2 captured in the wood. Unless the bulk of that energy comes from renewables, they are doing nothing to fight climate change. Natural growing trees have a much better net effect on carbon capture.

The reason they're unlikely to be using renewables is industrial processes require lots of heat. There aren't many renewable thermal energy systems today. There could be more, but it's a nascent industry.

The process to remove lignin from wood is very nasty. Organic solvents, acids, etc. Very similar to the wood pulping process in the paper mill industry. Calling it “green” is a big stretch.

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Our city has a plant that makes this and you can see the thick smoke coming from the exhaust chimney for miles. It is thick and dark and generating so much energy that they just release into the atmosphere every day. Real wood goes in and boards wrapped in plastic come out. It's not capturing carbon and it is not helping our planet.

We should be bioengineering trees or plants that capture carbon more efficiently and grow faster.

We already have manufactured beef, that’s how the government is spying on us!!

Like combining bamboo growth speeds with anything that absorbs mass amounts of carbon?

Could you imagine a redwood that can grow to the size they are in just a few years?!?

It would be incredible! Though I’m not sure they’d have the density as I think quick growing speeds normally result in a less dense wood. Im not an expert or even novice of any kind with tree husbandry though so just take it as the musings of a random person.

And how!

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New mousetrap, right here.

Just give them protein shakes.

How come we don't just build with Carbon fiber sourced from captured Carbon?

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BS, it craves easily under pressure. I don’t think this is anything but an add to promote engineered word

Brawndo. It’s what plants crave!

Of our city.

With the engineered, you can build much taller wooden buildings. Which, in turn, captures more carbon and means that wood is used instead of cement

Clw bridges are dumb; clw buildings with waterproofing membranes are good

Yes, but it's not strong enough for the types of buildings they're trying to construct.

Why does everyone read about new developments online and just presume that people who've researched this stuff for years haven't heard of x or y super basic thing?

> Unless the bulk of that energy comes from renewables, they are doing nothing to fight climate change.

The exact same refrain we hear from naysayers for any new technology. The electricity grids are already rapidly changing, why would we wait for them to be fully changed before trying to replace our other technologies?

You're also incorrect, because this isn't to replace regular wood - it's to replace concrete, which is CO2-intensive to produce.

The 20+ people who upvoted this idiotic comment also didn't even attempt to read the article.

Which city?

Does it decompose like regular wood or just leads to more forever waste?

It’s got electrolytes!

I’ll def admit I didn’t read the article. I read the headline and imagined a forest of fake Christmas trees

Am I misunderstanding? Isn't this stuff made out of real wood?

Comes in a tub

"I can''t believe it's not wood"

edit dropped one "

This still isn't even close to a solution. When any wood breaks down (burns, decays, etc), including this wood, it will still release its stored CO2 into the atmosphere. All this will accomplish is increase the time it will take for CO2 to enter the atmosphere; the same total amount will still reach the atmosphere eventually.

Since when is presenting facts naysaying? Just because you don't understand the facts doesn't mean they disappear.

The synthetic wood manufacturing requires high amounts of heat, impractical to deliver through electricity. The transmission lines would have to be enormous, not to mention actually generating enough of it. The more efficient and practical way to use renewables would be to use concentrated solar thermal, but that's still under development for industrial use. Fusion sounds great in theory too. Question is will it be economically viable.

I am curious where you read that it's to replace concrete. The treated wood still contains cellulose which is vulnerable to water. Most concrete applications are exposed to water.

Honestly, floor trusses are still the best option when you can use them. They use less material, are cheaper, and use solid sawn lumber. They also have room for mechanical chases.

Engineered lumber (Structural Composite Lumber or SCL) is stronger and stiffer than normal lumber; however it's also more expensive than trusses. Typically, we prefer to use trusses unless the strength of the SCL is needed.

The main advantage is that SCL can be more cheaply produced in deep sections (16-24 inches deep) and in long spans (up to 48 feet) than solid seen lumber. It is also straight and uniform. It allows us to avoid more expensive materials (steel, concrete).

They do make exterior use Structural Composite Lumber (SCL) than can be used in wet conditions. Generally, though, SCL is not rated for wet use. It depends on the product.

It's the same idea as plywood or OSB, just formed into beams instead of sheets.

Because then a 1200 sqft house would cost $2 million.

SCL is good for certain applications, not for others. The real breakthrough for multi-story wood construction wasn't SCL (although it helps), but experimentation with tie-down systems and shear walls. Tall buildings are subject to overturning and racking, which requires shear walls and continuous tie-down rods.

The real use of SCL is that its stronger than normal wood, and is cheaper than steel or reinforced concrete for certain applications.

Seismic resistance has more to do with shear walls and tie downs than engineered lumber. We do use it frequently though due to its strength.

Just be careful not to make a new Kudzu vine!

Bruh I wish WEF and Al Gore would stfu about CO2, it’s literally plant food. They should focus on the shit that got released in Ohio, the real threat to the world.

>types of buildings they're trying to construct.

Having lost everything in a house fire, I'm okay in concrete.

Yeah, expensive wood is expensive -- it's not like it grows on trees

... oh... wait...

got wood?

wood 2.0

we cluttering the biome with bio-spam now

I thought bamboo already absorbs massive amounts of carbon

You think it's pulling all that plant mass out of thin air?

oh... wait...

engineered wood can also be used to build taller wooden ladders to help us deal with the towering skyscraper infernos when the wooden buildings catch on fire

Maybe it can give us better hardwood floors

Or couldn't we use its strength to make bigger wooden structures? How much stronger is it? And actually, don't different types of wood already have different strengths? So what is this engineered wood being compared to?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRbRVlX7Ql0

I'm thinking indestructible toothpicks

The article seems to say the strength is compared to the strength of the same wood before treatment. At least that's the impression I got.

And you could use it for larger structures. I was just thinking about more efficiency with things like wider stud widths so you'd need less wood for the same wall.

Except significant more energy goes into its production, and there are all sorts of chemicals associated with the glue.

Sure, it has its positives, but let's not overlook the shortcomings.

I don’t see how switching to engineered wood somehow saves trees. It’s still wood, so it uses trees. But that’s not a bad thing — trees are much more sustainable than many other building materials. The real potential is in replacing not lumber but concrete, which is an environmental scourge.

I hate to be a nay-sayer, but this really isn’t the problem. Plants are extremely good at capturing carbon, as there’s strong selective pressure to photosynthesize efficiently. Our problem is about managing greenhouse gas production and better stewardship of these already amazing plants. I don’t think we should hold our breath awaiting some technical innovation that would drastically improve upon many millions of years of evolution.

It happens with every single research result. Paper comes out saying “x causes y”, then some Redditor living living i their moms basement comments “Oh, but what if it selection bias, oh, what if y is just more prevalent, oh, etc efc”

Captures more CO2 than trees? I doubt that highly

They are fire rated just as well as other buildings. This has already been thought of.

Lignin balls

Engineered wood is held together with seriously problematic adhesives.

Historical note - Anyone else recall that the use of those adhesives in the fake wood fitting of trailer homes caused so many horrible health problems that new standards had to be made (federally in the USA) insuring that the trailer homes would exchange all the air in home for fresh air at a much higher rate.

That's what you would be breathing.

Mind you we COULD have really good engineered wood from 3d printed cellulose (grown in big vats, fast and cheap). Instead we get strand board and chip board and fake timbers full of formaldehyde based glues, all of which come from OIL.

Oh well. Everyone is already slated to get cancer at least twice, so I supposed some additional cancers and brain damage and immune damage won't make that much difference.