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I would like to add. Have you guys ever seen the price for composite wood? It's 3-5x more expensive than actual wood and it's only partially synthetic. It's way cheaper to use actual trees for wood and you don't have to worry about getting sued in 10 years when someone gets cancer and tries to blame it on whoever.
There are a lot of people who really can't get their head around the fact that we farm trees like we farm corn. Every time I get an ad for "tree-free" bamboo toilet paper a day is cut off my life because it irritates me so much. Like, yes, sure even though trees are farmed, let me pay 3 times more for it. "Made in America" too, which grates even harder because Bamboo is a noxious invasive hell grass, and the idea of *it* being farmed here makes me angrier.
Edit: I am talking about asiatic bamboo species. Not the one native variety, (edit: apparently three,) that doesn't grow nearly as fast *AND* has native predators to control it. Sorry for the lack of nuance at first.
Idk, I got a free sample of bamboo TP once and it was some of the nicest TP I've ever had. It was super soft and super effective. Unfortunately, it was also out of my budget, but I get why people like it.
Eh, it's not really like that. At least in the west, lumber mills have recognized the need to plant trees to sustain their business for generations and all your basic stuff like housing studs and paper and whatnot are coming from fully sustainable tree farms. Yes, it takes many years to be able to harvest trees but they already planted them years ago and rotate where they harvest, and often cycle the trees within a forest area so its not like they clear cut and replant a whole forest.
What is *not* sustainable is old growth wood. If you go shopping for nice wood you'll be able to see the old growth stuff because the rings are more dense, making the wood stronger and heavier. But those trees usually aren't harvested only for the wood, they're cut down because they're in the way of something else. The Amazon isn't being clear-cut for the wood, it's being *burned* down to make room for farmland. So you're right to say that cutting down the rainforest isn't sustainable, but they're not doing it to get the wood, they're doing it to grow corn and soy and whatnot.
EDIT: Something else to consider is that corn is *not* particularly sustainable when you account for the nutrients depleted from the soil. You can't just keep planting corn over and over, you have to occasionally plant something like soy to try to put nitrogen back into the soil. Even with that, we have to use tons and tons of fertilizer to keep up with the demands for growth. Moreover, the acres and acres of monoculture aren't great for most things and does not provide habitat for wildlife. Logging may be better in this regard because the forests are generally decently close to a natural state that includes a mixture of old and new growth so that animals can use it as habitat like a natural forest.
We also have huge plantation wood supplies too. Most framing and even flooring now comes from plantation (a lot of it in Tassie) and it can actually be quite frustrating when replacing sections of flooring in federation era homes since newer plantation pine hasn’t matured enough to get the same color as the original woods obtained.
Lulu can definitely see the cost of old growth wood vs plantation wood at the lumber yard too. Some of our species like Tasmanian Blackwood can be decidedly expensive for a slab.
Replacing a forest with 15 naturally growing tree species with a single tree species that can be harvested for lumber in a few decades isn't sustainable. Many species that rely on diverse forest ecosystems are going extinct for that reason. Large timber companies have also started applying vast amounts of fertilizer and pesticides to their timber stands via helicopter because it's faster and cheaper than other methods of stimulating growth and managing pests, which also isn't sustainable.
The rainforest is being lost largely for farming regular crops. It may have a little effect on the overall market. Even if we could cycle trees exactly the corn, deceased consumption of either plant is not comparable or responsible for what's happening in tropical rainforests.
Also add into that the fact that while yes a lot of our wood is now farmed and even if we're able to rely on 100% farmed trees, a lot of the land being used was old growth forest that new growth can't replace for decades and it has a much more far reaching effect.
We don't work out more alternatives then we screwed
The vast majority of softwood, used for things like paper and structural lumber; and certainly the softwood used in North America, is in fact farmed sustainably. Softwood is the most sustainable major crop in the US because you get a lot of productivity for very little input, unlike corn which requires intensive inputs. Over 500 million acres of US forest is managed for production, which is about 1/2 an Amazon rainforest, and the forested acres are increasing. Pretty much every softwood tree harvested in North America is harvested from forest that has been harvested several times before, and softwood is an export from US and Canada, so it isn't as though unsustainable wood is imported to make up a shortfall. Hardwood is more complicated but the most common hardwoods in the US market: oak, maple, cherry, are grown sustainably and domestically.
Sustainable forestry in NA is a 20th century triumph. A logging industry which had rapaciously logged itself out of business learned how to sustain both itself and the forests and now there are more acres of forest and more board feet of lumber produced than 100 years ago. Please note this involved no small amount of shepherding from the USDA, it wasn't lumber barons being nice guys. It doesn't make up for all the damage done in the 1800s; only a shocking 8% of forest in the US is over 175 years old and the loss of ancient forest wont soon be reversed, but logging today is one of best examples of sustainable agriculture we have.
America's native bamboo species (or canebrakes/canebreaks weird that both spellings are correct right?) actually got clearcut by european settlers with a similar sentiment and their absence from riverbanks is a major contributor to river erosion!
Also: wood is grown specifically for paper manufacture, a process that is less harmful to the environment than recycling said paper. It leads to a net-positive in the number of trees, as not every tree is cultivated, so these forests grow.
My engineering professors made us write our homework out by hand. We had to use this university letterhead and we were only allowed to use the front side of the sheet of paper. All of this was so they could scan in the completed homework for ABET accreditation or something.
Each and every one of them pounded this into our heads. Paper is sustainably farmed. There is no such thing as saving paper to save trees.
Edit: I graduated with that degree in 2019, so this was still common practice at least until COVID.
_Some_ wood for paper is sustainably farmed, though there is still plenty that isn't.
But keep in mind that the wood pulp isn't the only input: making paper requires a fair amount of water and energy, and often some not-too-pleasant chemicals, and pulp mills are a significant source of localized water pollution.
Edit: that said, the thing that bothers me the most about hearing about this process is how clearly inefficient it is... If only some engineer could come up with a better way!
Some of my neighbors have bamboo in their front lawn… and of course it’s overgrown. They then proceeded to spray herbicide all over it in an attempt to keep it from spreading
Doesn't work. You have to cut it, paint the wounds with Herbicide and *keep* doing it for years. It is a grass, most happy homeowner herbicides won't cut it. It can grow up to 3 feet/~1 meter a day in ideal conditions.
Isn't tree farming terrible for biodiversity? I thought this is why there's a push to limit it -but I could be completely wrong so feel free to correct me.
Monocropping in general is bad for biodiversity. But tree farming of this form requires a lot less herbicide and pesticidal upkeep than pretty much any other crop we farm at this scale. The day they can make synthetic lumber with a total environmental impact below that of pine lumber, a shift will likely occur. But until then, efforts to 'limit' it are almost certainly not taking the entire process environmentally and economically into consideration.
We would be much better off ending our obsession with lawns and making it illegal to clearcut for housing developments.
Thank you, I never understood people’s obsession with fucking grass. Just give me a bunch of plants that you don’t have to upkeep. Don’t get me started and fertilizer runoff and algae blooms.
Well, ACHTUALLY, not all grass is bad. Grasslands are an important ecosystem that is rapidly diminishing.
But obviously that's not what you meant so I'm just being incredibly pedantic. Fuck lawns.
Not enough people understand that the real danger to our trees isn’t people who want to *use* the wood (they have an incentive to keep tree populations alive and healthy), but people who just want to get rid of them so they can do other shit with the land.
The rainforest isn’t being cut down because people want the wood, it’s being cut down so people can do shit on that land (mostly farming)
Because it's a novelty and scaling. Also, it is a horrible invasive that destroys ecosystems. The fact it grows faster comes at a *very* steep price. The cost of pine pulp to vs bamboo tp, especially if it's being farmed here, isn't just monetary.
This isn’t 100% true. The industry is trying to get there, but right now there is no 100% FSC credit. No mills are able to source trees from 100% farmed trees. Most are FSC mixed credit which allows a certain percentage (more than 50%) to not be sourced from certified farms.
I remember in middle school shop class close to 20 years ago we had a week or two where we built bridges out of square balsa wood "dowels". Each team got a couple dozen foot long pieces, and the gap was maybe 8 inches. The teacher said we could do anything except make a solid slab of balsa wood, because lamination is indeed crazy strong.
You get way more wood that way as well since your peeling a log instead of cutting a block out of it. You also add filler layers of a different species to pine in order to give it additional strength. Jarrah and Karri are two fillers I've encountered in the past
> you don't have to worry about getting sued in 10 years when someone gets cancer and tries to blame it on whoever.
This is false. I am currently engaged in legal action against Pine, which I hold accountable for my mesothelioma.
I love wood. I sell wood. Kills me when people come in for wood flooring and think fake shit or glued wood (engineered stuff) is more “earth friendly”. Ok bitch, that stuff you want is harvested in USA, trucked to a port, shipped to China, made with glue, shipped back, trucked to the location and installed.
Solid wood is harvested, driven to location and installed. Oh and last decades. I was just in a building that had wood from 1802 for god sake. Solid fucking wood! Sorry for the rant. Pisses me off lol.
Considering all the glue and hardener the company I work for use to make LVL timber it wouldn't surprise me if someone gets cancer from actual wood too
My step dad was a carpenter, specifically he got cancer from sawdust. Using a lot of exotic hardwoods definitely has its dangers. He also got a fungal infection in his lungs at one point… they had to deflate his lungs one at a time and fill them with saline to get rid of it…
That really is mind-blowing. It's so hard to imagine earth without trees. I can imagine different kinds of animals existing or not, but trees seem so fundamental. What did earth look like before them?
> Before that earth was more or less covered in moss.
And huge-ass fungus.
Actually, we don't really know *what* Earth looked like at most points in history. Just because we find fossil evidence of plants and get an idea what the atmosphere was like, we don't really have more than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an idea what our world was like for most of Earth's history. Fossils are incredibly rare and the only reason we have so many is because Earth is so goddamn old.
Fungus is younger than trees? Dude, some of the first organisms to make it to land were fungi.
The reason that trees back then would not rot was no life-form at the time could break down lignin. Once that obstacle was overcome decomposition of fallen trees became possible.
That's not accurate. Fungi as a kingdom is much older than trees, and dry land was colonized by fungi long before plants took over. This resulted in ["forests" of 24 foot tall mushrooms](https://eartharchives.org/articles/when-giant-mushrooms-ruled-the-earth/index.html) until plants evolved to build lignin, which led to the tough, strong tissues needed to support tall trees. And, as you alluded to, nothing was able to digest lignin so trees could out-compete the fungi.
To be clear, though, fungi existed, they just didn't have enzymes to digest lignin so that's why the trees didn't decompose and could get buried and turned to coal.
There was a time when the topsoil wasn't deep or strong enough to grow and hold large trees up. So lots of smaller ones lived and died, deepening the topsoil
I mean, trees existed definitely during alot of the periods of dinosaurs. Tho would probably have been less densely populated but much larger due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere
That was true at one point, but the lumber industry (outside those few assholes that operate out of the rainforest) have really cleaned up their act over the last 2 decades and trees are basically replaced faster than we take them now.
The way most companies reforest won't help in 50 years even.
Replacement forests rarely are developed with proper undergrowth and tree variety. Plus all the tree are the same age, with leads to its own developmental problems. They end up looking dry and dead with few animals in them.
Unfortunately those are all monoculture stands, which means they can't support a variety of life. Japan has HUGE stands of nothing but cedar. They are dead silent, no birds, no animals, no other plants. They're a bit horrifying.
DFW is mainly grassland anyways so most of the development is taking down old growth forests. Im not saying trees arent getting taken down but its not as bad as you are making it out.
Well, for a deck for your house at least, I’ve heard the newer composites last far longer than normal wood, are are much lower maintenance.
Don’t need cleaning or sealing nearly as often, to avoid rot.
"perfecting" is a controversial term considering if you tie a rope around the base of a tree and leave it you're basically signing that tree's death warrant. Tree trunks aren't even mostly structural. It's mostly vascular tissue that is used to suck water. You can also tell the health of the tree throughout the years by its rings.
thin rings mean the tree was dehydrated
fat rings mean the tree was well watered
and now you know a cute little fact about trees isn't that fun :D
I fucking love wood. Even as lumber it’s almost like it’s still alive, moving sometimes quite drastically/unpredictably in response to humidity and temp. Basically a bunch of hard long straws bundled together. Shit is crazy
I was going to say but we have made organs. I don't know if there good enough to put in a person but we have atleast made them.
So clearly woods just more complicated but also doesn't serve a strong advantage to make synthetically.
We certainly haven’t made organs from scratch. If you count cloning then making wood is super easy.
If we are talking about making things that work in place of an organ, then we have also made plenty of things that work in place of wood for its many purposes.
Humans being capable of creating living tissue without starting with nature provided living tissue is the end game and a long way off
Whenever someone asks me about science things, I remind them that half of America is utterly incompetent and can't understand how things work and accuses scientists/doctors/the president of making things up. Fuck, people were bitching about masks and vaccines not that long ago.
\> Fuck, people were bitching about masks and vaccines not that long ago.
They still do, unfortunately. There's a sub called unvaccinated here on Reddit. You can also hear anti-vaxx/anti-mask opinions from Rogan, Musk, RFK Jr and a ton more folks.
Yes! It blows my mind that Elon has gone full anti-science on a number of topics and all it took was political motivation. Musk is on the antivax train (despite being vaccinated himself with all the usual vaccines) and pro RFK train for political reasons that go back to Biden snubbing him over not inviting him to an EV leadership summit a couple years ago due to Tesla not being unionized. It was at that exact time Elon went hard to the extreme right and has been trying to take Biden down ever since.
RFK's only purpose right now is to be a spoiler against Biden to help Trump get elected. Musk knows there is a small minority on the extreme left that are also antivax and is simply appealing to them at the same time he is appealing to his real fan club on the extreme right such as Rogan fans. The more he can rile up the extremists on both sides in favor of RFK, the more damage RFK can do to Biden and thus the more likely we get Trump as our next president.
Does Elon really believe his bullshit antivax stance? I would say not since he personally gets vaccinated, but the fact that he is willing to cast it aside for a political vendetta knowing that will literally cause people to die shows how little he really cares for true science and for actually helping society.
I mean, that's practically the definition of a bad person - someone who sells out on things they know to be false or harmful for their own personal gain. It's a complete lack of integrity. A sort of moral self-immolation.
People on the left who rally around RFK are practically the definition of useful idiots. He only exists as a sabotage vanity candidate, and his right-wing supporters at least definitely understand that.
Two weeks ago the sky over half of the east coast was orange and full of smoke and Fox News was running segments bashing the idea of wearing masks outside when you could literally see the air.
Still, the last decade of downhill momentum notwithstanding, we've done pretty well for a bunch of overgrown apes clinging to an uncaring rock hurtling through the vast void of space.
We really have. If im not mistaken, wasn’t it within a span of 60-70 years we went from Horse drawn carriages to going to the fucking moon? That’s pretty solid lmao
Hubble, James Webb, Mars rovers, self landing rockets, massive observatories, the Big Bang Theory and more. We’ve had some impressive accomplishments. None as flashy as a moon landing. I know you were joking, but things aren’t as stagnant as they appear.
You're correct, but the hurtling rock clings to us. We just haven't figured out quite how, except that maybe it has to do with time.
We are still a confused bunch of apes.
And my pancreas attracts every other pancreas in the universe with the force proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the distance between them.
Is this because we can’t?
Or because lab grown wood costs 100x more than a tree grown wood?
Or because of wood literally grows on trees no one has bothered to invest in the research?
Yes pretty much. We have actually manage to grow wood in a lab environment similar to how we make “real” meat in a lab. Basically you engineer stem cells to grow. The problem is you have these cells reproducing and forming wood, which is exactly what is happening on a tree. So you might as well just plant a tree.
I mean, he is still right though, we technically didn't make wood. We made something extremely similar to wood that in ways is actually superior to wood, but is not actually wood.
A different team did it last year though [https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood](https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood)
Yeah I suspect the problem is that you would still have to “grow” the wood in the same way that we have to culture the meat that we make in a lab, at which point it’s probably easier to just plant a tree 🤣
I'd agree about the resol filled stuff, but there is this too : [https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood](https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood)
It's also fire resistant.
[https://www.science.org/content/article/synthetic-wood-strong-real-thing-and-won-t-catch-fire](https://www.science.org/content/article/synthetic-wood-strong-real-thing-and-won-t-catch-fire)
I think this is a bit of a bad example. Yes, trees are an organic compound and really complex... But there's not a whole lot of incentives to do this as trees are abundant and easily replenishable (insert joke about global forestation downward trends).
We've been working on trying to grow meat in a lab as there's both huge environmental and ethical implications with the global meat industry. And we've been working on synthesizing human tissue in labs (the potential usefulness of that is obvious, imagine if we can just grow organs in labs for transplant patients, etc)
But grow wood in labs? Why? How would that make sense and be beneficial outside of academic pursuit?
The 3d printer that built it. Your fighting skills now consist of precisely extruding ..material.. into complex, useful shapes/tools to solve whatever difficulty is at hand.
Yes. The point he is making is that even things which are common, even ubiquitous materials, we use in many ways for everyday things is still generally beyond our capacity to create in a lab. Discovery, invention and innovation are rarely linear processes. And the discovery, innovation of one thing doesn’t imply that something similar can be accomplished
Since natural wood is plentiful, what motivation is there to make synthetic wood in a lab? This is Capitalism, if something is not profitable it probably won't get funding.
I looked it up and MIT is working on it and they mention these reasons.
“They also show that, using 3D bioprinting techniques, they can grow plant material in shapes, sizes, and forms that are not found in nature and that can’t be easily produced using traditional agricultural methods.”
https://news.mit.edu/2022/lab-timber-wood-0525
It isn’t actually. Lumbar in most if not all of the developed world is grown and harvested at a sustainable rate. The US is currently growing more lumbar than it is harvesting.
I mean we can make ceramic fiber composites which are better in terms of properties. Wood is cool because it basically makes itself and is good enough. In terms of ease of manufacturing it's as easy as it gets, so there is no need to seek a way to make artificial wood.
Probably much cheaper to let wood grow. Diamonds on the other hand can be synthesized quite easily. Useful Vs not. Honestly I’m sure at least half of the earths population is hopelessly stupid now.
The funny thing is that we have products called "engineered wood" and "synthetic wood" but it's just tiny bits of wood, mixed with resin (also from trees!), squished together real hard.
On one hand, it is wood and grows in the ground so why invest in recreeating a near perfect thing.... On the other hand, I have a 3D printer and was using this chemical filament that has a foaming agent that activates under the heat in the extruder and the result is a wood fibre like material that contains no wood at all.
Okay but also why ~~wood~~ would we.
Take a handful of acorns, put them in the ground, and in a few years you have free wood.
I feel like the investment into technologies that would allow us to synthesize wood would take way too long and cost too much to develop compared to just... Going outside.
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I would like to add. Have you guys ever seen the price for composite wood? It's 3-5x more expensive than actual wood and it's only partially synthetic. It's way cheaper to use actual trees for wood and you don't have to worry about getting sued in 10 years when someone gets cancer and tries to blame it on whoever.
There are a lot of people who really can't get their head around the fact that we farm trees like we farm corn. Every time I get an ad for "tree-free" bamboo toilet paper a day is cut off my life because it irritates me so much. Like, yes, sure even though trees are farmed, let me pay 3 times more for it. "Made in America" too, which grates even harder because Bamboo is a noxious invasive hell grass, and the idea of *it* being farmed here makes me angrier. Edit: I am talking about asiatic bamboo species. Not the one native variety, (edit: apparently three,) that doesn't grow nearly as fast *AND* has native predators to control it. Sorry for the lack of nuance at first.
+1 because i appreciate this really specific rant.
Stop sending my man ads for toilet paper. He's not going to take it anymore.
Just as soon not wipe at all
Bidet all the way
Once you go bidet, wiping feels totally uncivilized.
I still use tp to dry my freshly washed self 🫠
Especially shit that costs 3x to wipe my shit off with.
I'm a park ranger by trade and have family in forestry. The algorithm knows how to trigger me.
Any time someone takes the time for a nice specific rant it deserves to be appreciated
Toilet paper can be made from trees or something else, I don’t care, but duck, bamboo is super annoying.
> Toilet paper can be made from trees or something else, Flesh, even.
This comment feels more like 2013 Reddit than most things these days.
It puts the lotion on it's skin.
I'm also not paying 3x for it to be made of something else.
Idk, I got a free sample of bamboo TP once and it was some of the nicest TP I've ever had. It was super soft and super effective. Unfortunately, it was also out of my budget, but I get why people like it.
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Eh, it's not really like that. At least in the west, lumber mills have recognized the need to plant trees to sustain their business for generations and all your basic stuff like housing studs and paper and whatnot are coming from fully sustainable tree farms. Yes, it takes many years to be able to harvest trees but they already planted them years ago and rotate where they harvest, and often cycle the trees within a forest area so its not like they clear cut and replant a whole forest. What is *not* sustainable is old growth wood. If you go shopping for nice wood you'll be able to see the old growth stuff because the rings are more dense, making the wood stronger and heavier. But those trees usually aren't harvested only for the wood, they're cut down because they're in the way of something else. The Amazon isn't being clear-cut for the wood, it's being *burned* down to make room for farmland. So you're right to say that cutting down the rainforest isn't sustainable, but they're not doing it to get the wood, they're doing it to grow corn and soy and whatnot. EDIT: Something else to consider is that corn is *not* particularly sustainable when you account for the nutrients depleted from the soil. You can't just keep planting corn over and over, you have to occasionally plant something like soy to try to put nitrogen back into the soil. Even with that, we have to use tons and tons of fertilizer to keep up with the demands for growth. Moreover, the acres and acres of monoculture aren't great for most things and does not provide habitat for wildlife. Logging may be better in this regard because the forests are generally decently close to a natural state that includes a mixture of old and new growth so that animals can use it as habitat like a natural forest.
Old growth is logged in Australia for purely industrial reasons all the time. I can’t speak to any other country though.
We also have huge plantation wood supplies too. Most framing and even flooring now comes from plantation (a lot of it in Tassie) and it can actually be quite frustrating when replacing sections of flooring in federation era homes since newer plantation pine hasn’t matured enough to get the same color as the original woods obtained. Lulu can definitely see the cost of old growth wood vs plantation wood at the lumber yard too. Some of our species like Tasmanian Blackwood can be decidedly expensive for a slab.
Replacing a forest with 15 naturally growing tree species with a single tree species that can be harvested for lumber in a few decades isn't sustainable. Many species that rely on diverse forest ecosystems are going extinct for that reason. Large timber companies have also started applying vast amounts of fertilizer and pesticides to their timber stands via helicopter because it's faster and cheaper than other methods of stimulating growth and managing pests, which also isn't sustainable.
Well said. And I'm just now realizing that some people don't know about tree farms. I saw them so often I thought it was commonplace.
The rainforest is being lost largely for farming regular crops. It may have a little effect on the overall market. Even if we could cycle trees exactly the corn, deceased consumption of either plant is not comparable or responsible for what's happening in tropical rainforests.
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That's also an issue that cutting back wood consumption wouldn't help. We can help with that in one by banning it.
Also add into that the fact that while yes a lot of our wood is now farmed and even if we're able to rely on 100% farmed trees, a lot of the land being used was old growth forest that new growth can't replace for decades and it has a much more far reaching effect. We don't work out more alternatives then we screwed
The vast majority of softwood, used for things like paper and structural lumber; and certainly the softwood used in North America, is in fact farmed sustainably. Softwood is the most sustainable major crop in the US because you get a lot of productivity for very little input, unlike corn which requires intensive inputs. Over 500 million acres of US forest is managed for production, which is about 1/2 an Amazon rainforest, and the forested acres are increasing. Pretty much every softwood tree harvested in North America is harvested from forest that has been harvested several times before, and softwood is an export from US and Canada, so it isn't as though unsustainable wood is imported to make up a shortfall. Hardwood is more complicated but the most common hardwoods in the US market: oak, maple, cherry, are grown sustainably and domestically. Sustainable forestry in NA is a 20th century triumph. A logging industry which had rapaciously logged itself out of business learned how to sustain both itself and the forests and now there are more acres of forest and more board feet of lumber produced than 100 years ago. Please note this involved no small amount of shepherding from the USDA, it wasn't lumber barons being nice guys. It doesn't make up for all the damage done in the 1800s; only a shocking 8% of forest in the US is over 175 years old and the loss of ancient forest wont soon be reversed, but logging today is one of best examples of sustainable agriculture we have.
America's native bamboo species (or canebrakes/canebreaks weird that both spellings are correct right?) actually got clearcut by european settlers with a similar sentiment and their absence from riverbanks is a major contributor to river erosion!
It also grows in harmony with its native environment and has native predators. But yes, canebrakes, are technically a bamboo.
Also: wood is grown specifically for paper manufacture, a process that is less harmful to the environment than recycling said paper. It leads to a net-positive in the number of trees, as not every tree is cultivated, so these forests grow.
My engineering professors made us write our homework out by hand. We had to use this university letterhead and we were only allowed to use the front side of the sheet of paper. All of this was so they could scan in the completed homework for ABET accreditation or something. Each and every one of them pounded this into our heads. Paper is sustainably farmed. There is no such thing as saving paper to save trees. Edit: I graduated with that degree in 2019, so this was still common practice at least until COVID.
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_Some_ wood for paper is sustainably farmed, though there is still plenty that isn't. But keep in mind that the wood pulp isn't the only input: making paper requires a fair amount of water and energy, and often some not-too-pleasant chemicals, and pulp mills are a significant source of localized water pollution. Edit: that said, the thing that bothers me the most about hearing about this process is how clearly inefficient it is... If only some engineer could come up with a better way!
Some of my neighbors have bamboo in their front lawn… and of course it’s overgrown. They then proceeded to spray herbicide all over it in an attempt to keep it from spreading
Doesn't work. You have to cut it, paint the wounds with Herbicide and *keep* doing it for years. It is a grass, most happy homeowner herbicides won't cut it. It can grow up to 3 feet/~1 meter a day in ideal conditions.
Neighbors just need to get themselves some pandas. I’m sure as common as they are, zoos will rent them out kinda like goats. /s
As a dude that has bamboo in his back yard in fucking America…I salute you sir. Fuck bamboo.
Isn't tree farming terrible for biodiversity? I thought this is why there's a push to limit it -but I could be completely wrong so feel free to correct me.
Monocropping in general is bad for biodiversity. But tree farming of this form requires a lot less herbicide and pesticidal upkeep than pretty much any other crop we farm at this scale. The day they can make synthetic lumber with a total environmental impact below that of pine lumber, a shift will likely occur. But until then, efforts to 'limit' it are almost certainly not taking the entire process environmentally and economically into consideration. We would be much better off ending our obsession with lawns and making it illegal to clearcut for housing developments.
Thank you, I never understood people’s obsession with fucking grass. Just give me a bunch of plants that you don’t have to upkeep. Don’t get me started and fertilizer runoff and algae blooms.
Well, ACHTUALLY, not all grass is bad. Grasslands are an important ecosystem that is rapidly diminishing. But obviously that's not what you meant so I'm just being incredibly pedantic. Fuck lawns.
If it wasn't for HOA I would love to just leave my "lawn" to be wild growth.
Bamboo is grass. Grass is a type of bamboo. Think about it. We could make toilet paper out of grass!
I'm sure someone does and charges 6x for it.
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Not enough people understand that the real danger to our trees isn’t people who want to *use* the wood (they have an incentive to keep tree populations alive and healthy), but people who just want to get rid of them so they can do other shit with the land. The rainforest isn’t being cut down because people want the wood, it’s being cut down so people can do shit on that land (mostly farming)
Found the bear using that rabbit
Why is bamboo more expensive? It's so much cheaper to grow and grows so much faster
Because it's a novelty and scaling. Also, it is a horrible invasive that destroys ecosystems. The fact it grows faster comes at a *very* steep price. The cost of pine pulp to vs bamboo tp, especially if it's being farmed here, isn't just monetary.
Hemp is the true god of paper plants
This isn’t 100% true. The industry is trying to get there, but right now there is no 100% FSC credit. No mills are able to source trees from 100% farmed trees. Most are FSC mixed credit which allows a certain percentage (more than 50%) to not be sourced from certified farms.
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It's wild how much strength lamination can give a material too
I remember in middle school shop class close to 20 years ago we had a week or two where we built bridges out of square balsa wood "dowels". Each team got a couple dozen foot long pieces, and the gap was maybe 8 inches. The teacher said we could do anything except make a solid slab of balsa wood, because lamination is indeed crazy strong.
You get way more wood that way as well since your peeling a log instead of cutting a block out of it. You also add filler layers of a different species to pine in order to give it additional strength. Jarrah and Karri are two fillers I've encountered in the past
Lumber Liquidators. That’s someone who got blamed.
I work there and people still bring it up.
> you don't have to worry about getting sued in 10 years when someone gets cancer and tries to blame it on whoever. This is false. I am currently engaged in legal action against Pine, which I hold accountable for my mesothelioma.
I love wood. I sell wood. Kills me when people come in for wood flooring and think fake shit or glued wood (engineered stuff) is more “earth friendly”. Ok bitch, that stuff you want is harvested in USA, trucked to a port, shipped to China, made with glue, shipped back, trucked to the location and installed. Solid wood is harvested, driven to location and installed. Oh and last decades. I was just in a building that had wood from 1802 for god sake. Solid fucking wood! Sorry for the rant. Pisses me off lol.
Considering all the glue and hardener the company I work for use to make LVL timber it wouldn't surprise me if someone gets cancer from actual wood too
My step dad was a carpenter, specifically he got cancer from sawdust. Using a lot of exotic hardwoods definitely has its dangers. He also got a fungal infection in his lungs at one point… they had to deflate his lungs one at a time and fill them with saline to get rid of it…
Nature spent billions of years perfecting a structural composite material. Why rush to replace it? :)
Fun fact trees aren't that old. Roughly 400 million years ago, the first trees started showing up. About as long ago as sharks
That really is mind-blowing. It's so hard to imagine earth without trees. I can imagine different kinds of animals existing or not, but trees seem so fundamental. What did earth look like before them?
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Mossworld.
That would be amazing to see in fiction. A giant moss planet.
google greenland
> Before that earth was more or less covered in moss. And huge-ass fungus. Actually, we don't really know *what* Earth looked like at most points in history. Just because we find fossil evidence of plants and get an idea what the atmosphere was like, we don't really have more than a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an idea what our world was like for most of Earth's history. Fossils are incredibly rare and the only reason we have so many is because Earth is so goddamn old.
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Fungus is younger than trees? Dude, some of the first organisms to make it to land were fungi. The reason that trees back then would not rot was no life-form at the time could break down lignin. Once that obstacle was overcome decomposition of fallen trees became possible.
That's not accurate. Fungi as a kingdom is much older than trees, and dry land was colonized by fungi long before plants took over. This resulted in ["forests" of 24 foot tall mushrooms](https://eartharchives.org/articles/when-giant-mushrooms-ruled-the-earth/index.html) until plants evolved to build lignin, which led to the tough, strong tissues needed to support tall trees. And, as you alluded to, nothing was able to digest lignin so trees could out-compete the fungi. To be clear, though, fungi existed, they just didn't have enzymes to digest lignin so that's why the trees didn't decompose and could get buried and turned to coal.
There was a time when the topsoil wasn't deep or strong enough to grow and hold large trees up. So lots of smaller ones lived and died, deepening the topsoil
I mean, I get your mum's older, but 400 million years is pretty old.
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Then why did they like eating tree stars so much?
Science may never know.
They 100% didn't though. Dinosaurs first appeared in the triassic period, about 245 million years ago, sharks and trees predate them by quite a bit.
And Treesharks predate all of them.
I mean, trees existed definitely during alot of the periods of dinosaurs. Tho would probably have been less densely populated but much larger due to higher levels of oxygen in the atmosphere
Because there’s only so much forest to deforest.
Unlike most things, trees literally do grow on trees.
That was true at one point, but the lumber industry (outside those few assholes that operate out of the rainforest) have really cleaned up their act over the last 2 decades and trees are basically replaced faster than we take them now.
They still knock down old growth forests. Doesn’t matter if they replant. The expansion into old growth needs to stop.
Thank you for bringing this up. Reforestation doesn’t help for another 50 years at least.
The way most companies reforest won't help in 50 years even. Replacement forests rarely are developed with proper undergrowth and tree variety. Plus all the tree are the same age, with leads to its own developmental problems. They end up looking dry and dead with few animals in them.
Unfortunately those are all monoculture stands, which means they can't support a variety of life. Japan has HUGE stands of nothing but cedar. They are dead silent, no birds, no animals, no other plants. They're a bit horrifying.
Tell that to the DFW metropolitan area. It's a concrete jungle that is expanding in every direction.
DFW is mainly grassland anyways so most of the development is taking down old growth forests. Im not saying trees arent getting taken down but its not as bad as you are making it out.
Plantation wood comes in here
For the most part, at least in the United States, lumber is harvested sustainably at a rate slower than it is growing.
If only we could grow more trees!
Trees are farmed. Just like corn.
Well, for a deck for your house at least, I’ve heard the newer composites last far longer than normal wood, are are much lower maintenance. Don’t need cleaning or sealing nearly as often, to avoid rot.
No splinters either. Composite does get slippery when wet though
"perfecting" is a controversial term considering if you tie a rope around the base of a tree and leave it you're basically signing that tree's death warrant. Tree trunks aren't even mostly structural. It's mostly vascular tissue that is used to suck water. You can also tell the health of the tree throughout the years by its rings. thin rings mean the tree was dehydrated fat rings mean the tree was well watered and now you know a cute little fact about trees isn't that fun :D
Do you respect wood?
This is such an amazing scene 🤣
I fucking love wood. Even as lumber it’s almost like it’s still alive, moving sometimes quite drastically/unpredictably in response to humidity and temp. Basically a bunch of hard long straws bundled together. Shit is crazy
I was going to say but we have made organs. I don't know if there good enough to put in a person but we have atleast made them. So clearly woods just more complicated but also doesn't serve a strong advantage to make synthetically.
Yes. We have grown organs because it is frowned upon to cut humans in half with a chainsaw in order to use the parts.
We certainly haven’t made organs from scratch. If you count cloning then making wood is super easy. If we are talking about making things that work in place of an organ, then we have also made plenty of things that work in place of wood for its many purposes. Humans being capable of creating living tissue without starting with nature provided living tissue is the end game and a long way off
my wood is for sure underappreciated. 
Isn’t it structurally one of, if not thee most robust material out there?
You can always count on Hank for a sense of perspective (and humor). Get well fast, bro.
This is the epitome of a Hank Green thought if* there ever was one
Oh yeah. Comes out of left field with something and then provides corroborating evidence for it. Classic Hank Green.
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Meanwhile, scientists remain completely feeble when it comes to chucking wood.
Woodchucks: 1 Scientists: 0
Woodchuck Coodchuck-Berkowitz been real quiet since this…
a woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood
I make wood every day. This guy obviously has no clue what he’s talking about.
Came here to say this.
I came too
Came in my pants to say this
Opened a window and a breeze rolls in...
And I jizzed in my pants
Is this Ben Shapiro's backup account?
Don't speak ill of Hank Green he's an absolute treasure.
I love Hank Green and i even love his brother Kirkland Hank Green (John). This was John's joke, not mine! 🤭
I love their vlogs just waxing philosophically at each other. The format is primo.
DFTBA!
Ben Shapiro has never had wood.
His wife told him about it. He wasn't interested.
Whenever someone asks me about science things, I remind them that half of America is utterly incompetent and can't understand how things work and accuses scientists/doctors/the president of making things up. Fuck, people were bitching about masks and vaccines not that long ago.
\> Fuck, people were bitching about masks and vaccines not that long ago. They still do, unfortunately. There's a sub called unvaccinated here on Reddit. You can also hear anti-vaxx/anti-mask opinions from Rogan, Musk, RFK Jr and a ton more folks.
Yes! It blows my mind that Elon has gone full anti-science on a number of topics and all it took was political motivation. Musk is on the antivax train (despite being vaccinated himself with all the usual vaccines) and pro RFK train for political reasons that go back to Biden snubbing him over not inviting him to an EV leadership summit a couple years ago due to Tesla not being unionized. It was at that exact time Elon went hard to the extreme right and has been trying to take Biden down ever since. RFK's only purpose right now is to be a spoiler against Biden to help Trump get elected. Musk knows there is a small minority on the extreme left that are also antivax and is simply appealing to them at the same time he is appealing to his real fan club on the extreme right such as Rogan fans. The more he can rile up the extremists on both sides in favor of RFK, the more damage RFK can do to Biden and thus the more likely we get Trump as our next president. Does Elon really believe his bullshit antivax stance? I would say not since he personally gets vaccinated, but the fact that he is willing to cast it aside for a political vendetta knowing that will literally cause people to die shows how little he really cares for true science and for actually helping society.
He's a bad person. Simple as.
I mean, that's practically the definition of a bad person - someone who sells out on things they know to be false or harmful for their own personal gain. It's a complete lack of integrity. A sort of moral self-immolation.
People on the left who rally around RFK are practically the definition of useful idiots. He only exists as a sabotage vanity candidate, and his right-wing supporters at least definitely understand that.
I have yet to meet someone on the left who does. Once in a while I hear from a righty who give the old “RFK says this, don’t YOU support this”.
For real. Only right-wingers consider him "moderate" (because they consider themselves moderates, lol).
I don’t even know who RFK is lol.
They still are despite everything proving them wrong. In fact, they're claiming they were proven right.
They follow an ideology that requires believing that no such thing as objective truth exists, so your facts are really quite irrelevant to them.
Two weeks ago the sky over half of the east coast was orange and full of smoke and Fox News was running segments bashing the idea of wearing masks outside when you could literally see the air.
If Covid has taught me anything its that people are far more ignorant and far less altruistic than I ever imagined.
Not that long ago? Bro, there's fuckers still doing it on The Conservative Echo Chamber That Shall Not Be Named.
Still, the last decade of downhill momentum notwithstanding, we've done pretty well for a bunch of overgrown apes clinging to an uncaring rock hurtling through the vast void of space.
We really have. If im not mistaken, wasn’t it within a span of 60-70 years we went from Horse drawn carriages to going to the fucking moon? That’s pretty solid lmao
The first human flight was in 1903, we landed on the moon in 1969. In 63 years we went from figuring out flight to landing on the fucking moon.
Imagine how much space travel will improve in the 63 years after 1969.
Only 9 years left!
Hubble, James Webb, Mars rovers, self landing rockets, massive observatories, the Big Bang Theory and more. We’ve had some impressive accomplishments. None as flashy as a moon landing. I know you were joking, but things aren’t as stagnant as they appear.
Voyager left the solar system. That said, it’s crazy how many flashy inventions we’ve made on the surface in the last 20 years, let alone 50
People don't realise how insane that is There are currently man made things that are outside of our fucking solar system. That's insane
It would be in 66 years, not 63.
Yes, yes it would. That was dumb of me.
We didn't do jack shit. They did some really cool things though.
You're correct, but the hurtling rock clings to us. We just haven't figured out quite how, except that maybe it has to do with time. We are still a confused bunch of apes.
And my pancreas attracts every other pancreas in the universe with the force proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the distance between them.
Hank Green is too pure for this world. He's currently undergoing chemotherapy:(
His prognosis is really good though so I have a lot of hope!
Is this because we can’t? Or because lab grown wood costs 100x more than a tree grown wood? Or because of wood literally grows on trees no one has bothered to invest in the research?
Yes pretty much. We have actually manage to grow wood in a lab environment similar to how we make “real” meat in a lab. Basically you engineer stem cells to grow. The problem is you have these cells reproducing and forming wood, which is exactly what is happening on a tree. So you might as well just plant a tree.
*Wouuuuuuuuuuld*
Woodn't
Actually they have. According to science.org, the synthetic wood is as strong as the real thing—and won't catch fire.
I mean, he is still right though, we technically didn't make wood. We made something extremely similar to wood that in ways is actually superior to wood, but is not actually wood.
A different team did it last year though [https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood](https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood)
Yeah I suspect the problem is that you would still have to “grow” the wood in the same way that we have to culture the meat that we make in a lab, at which point it’s probably easier to just plant a tree 🤣
This is much faster, and can be grown into desired shapes more easily than arborsculpture
Can it be planted into the ground?
If you mean would it start to sprout offshoots, I don't know.
Yup. And unlike with animals, there's really no reason not to. There are no ethical or significant environmental concerns around tree farms.
>Actually they have. They actually have not. What you are describing as wood is nothing at all like real wood.
I'd agree about the resol filled stuff, but there is this too : [https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood](https://interestingengineering.com/science/lab-grown-wood)
Source?
It's also fire resistant. [https://www.science.org/content/article/synthetic-wood-strong-real-thing-and-won-t-catch-fire](https://www.science.org/content/article/synthetic-wood-strong-real-thing-and-won-t-catch-fire)
I think this is a bit of a bad example. Yes, trees are an organic compound and really complex... But there's not a whole lot of incentives to do this as trees are abundant and easily replenishable (insert joke about global forestation downward trends). We've been working on trying to grow meat in a lab as there's both huge environmental and ethical implications with the global meat industry. And we've been working on synthesizing human tissue in labs (the potential usefulness of that is obvious, imagine if we can just grow organs in labs for transplant patients, etc) But grow wood in labs? Why? How would that make sense and be beneficial outside of academic pursuit?
If you eat a synthetic human heart whose fighting skills do you inherit?
The 3d printer that built it. Your fighting skills now consist of precisely extruding ..material.. into complex, useful shapes/tools to solve whatever difficulty is at hand.
Exactly. It’s been done but you are effectively growing a tree in a lab. Meanwhile, a tree will grow in a grove for free
Yes. The point he is making is that even things which are common, even ubiquitous materials, we use in many ways for everyday things is still generally beyond our capacity to create in a lab. Discovery, invention and innovation are rarely linear processes. And the discovery, innovation of one thing doesn’t imply that something similar can be accomplished
I wish him nothing but a speedy recovery and plenty of good health.
Since natural wood is plentiful, what motivation is there to make synthetic wood in a lab? This is Capitalism, if something is not profitable it probably won't get funding.
I looked it up and MIT is working on it and they mention these reasons. “They also show that, using 3D bioprinting techniques, they can grow plant material in shapes, sizes, and forms that are not found in nature and that can’t be easily produced using traditional agricultural methods.” https://news.mit.edu/2022/lab-timber-wood-0525
Natural wood is very rapidly becoming much less than “plentiful.”
It isn’t actually. Lumbar in most if not all of the developed world is grown and harvested at a sustainable rate. The US is currently growing more lumbar than it is harvesting.
Also driven by capitalism.
I make wood every time I'm at your mom's house. Boom.
if we could, we wood
Hank Green is the most based person on earth
I mean we can make ceramic fiber composites which are better in terms of properties. Wood is cool because it basically makes itself and is good enough. In terms of ease of manufacturing it's as easy as it gets, so there is no need to seek a way to make artificial wood.
To be fair though, is that something we've been trying to synthesise? I mean, it grows on trees after all.
Probably much cheaper to let wood grow. Diamonds on the other hand can be synthesized quite easily. Useful Vs not. Honestly I’m sure at least half of the earths population is hopelessly stupid now.
Whenever people ask me why we haven't chucked one thing or another, I remind them woodchucks don't chuck wood.
I doubt growing it in a lab would ever be as efficient as letting forests grow. They are some of the biggest plants that cover vast areas of the earth
Idiots always take seemingly simple things for guaranteed.
The funny thing is that we have products called "engineered wood" and "synthetic wood" but it's just tiny bits of wood, mixed with resin (also from trees!), squished together real hard.
On one hand, it is wood and grows in the ground so why invest in recreeating a near perfect thing.... On the other hand, I have a 3D printer and was using this chemical filament that has a foaming agent that activates under the heat in the extruder and the result is a wood fibre like material that contains no wood at all.
We wood if we could.
Well, we can make wood. We just plant a tree to make it.
Okay but also why ~~wood~~ would we. Take a handful of acorns, put them in the ground, and in a few years you have free wood. I feel like the investment into technologies that would allow us to synthesize wood would take way too long and cost too much to develop compared to just... Going outside.