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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday May 28 2019, @07:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the sawing-logs dept.

Most of our building practices aren't especially sustainable. Concrete production is a major source of carbon emissions, and steel production is very resource intensive. Once completed, heating and cooling buildings becomes a major energy sink. There are various ideas on how to handle each of these issues, like variations on concrete's chemical formula or passive cooling schemes.

But now, a large team of US researchers has found a single solution that appears to manage everything using a sustainable material that both reflects sunlight and radiates away excess heat. The miracle material? Wood. Or a form of wood that has been treated to remove one of its two main components.

[...] But rather than simply being structurally useful, the wood has some properties that could make it extremely useful as cladding, covering the exterior of a building. While most of the cellulose fibers are aligned along the grain of the wood, that alignment is very rough—there's plenty of variability in their orientation. That means light that strikes the processed wood will bounce around within a dense mesh of cellulose fibers, scattering widely in the process. The end result is a material that looks remarkably white, in the same way a sugar cube looks white even though each sugar crystal in it is transparent.

As a result, the material is really bad at absorbing sunlight, and thus it doesn't capture the heat in the same way regular wood does.

But it gets better. The sugars in cellulose are effective emitters of infrared radiation, and they do so in two areas of the spectrum where none of our atmospheric gases is able to reabsorb it. The end result is that, if the treated wood absorbs some of the heat of a structure, wood can radiate it away so that it leaves the planet entirely. And the wood is able to do so even while it's being blasted by direct sunlight; the researchers confirmed this by putting a small heater inside a box made of the treated wood and then sticking it in the sunlight in Arizona.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:25PM (11 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:25PM (#848654) Journal

    This sounds cool, but, does this mean cutting down more trees? Buildings with concrete roofs are going to need this treated wood, to cool the buildings? And, it's going to take more trees to get the same amount of lumber, because we throw away the bits that don't cool. So, we have upsides, and downsides to it. And, we've already been doing a great job of defoliating the planet for at least a century.

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:44PM (8 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday May 28 2019, @08:44PM (#848661) Journal

    If it can last for decades, who cares how many trees we have to cut down? Just plant more.

    My concern is actually seeing this come to market. We hear about a lot of gee-whiz stuff that seemingly goes nowhere, and adoption may be slow and sporadic too.

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    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:47PM (6 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:47PM (#848674)

      My concern is how much energy and how many toxic chemicals the manufacturing process requires, compared to the final product's benefits.

      The precise nature of the process isn't mentioned in the paper, which suggested it might be nightmarishly complex or involve extremely toxic chemicals. But a check of the supplemental material shows that the process involves dumping the wood in concentrated hydrogen peroxide and boiling it.

      Lovely. Boiling concentrated hydrogen peroxide. Add massive explosions to the concerns list, then.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:05AM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @05:05AM (#848786)

        well, you do have to take into account that nothing toxic is leaked in rivers etc, and the explosion itself will not damage much more than the building.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:43AM (4 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:43AM (#848815)

          Hydrogen peroxide is one of the most poisonous things on the planet. That is why most organisms, including humans, have some sort of evolved resistance to it. It is also a bleach, and will destroy many materials it touches with oxidation. That stuff is nasty and the only reason most people think it is safe is because of they sold it in extremely low concentrations (made even lower by sitting on a shelf, in a warm, moist bathroom in an open bottle) as a disinfectant at the pharmacy, which you aren't supposed to use on wounds, again because it does more damage to you than most every-day germs will when a wound is washed in water.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:30AM (3 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 29 2019, @11:30AM (#848844)

            yes. and if you expose it to the atmosphere it releases oxygen and turns into harmless water very fast, so problem solved.

            • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:51PM (2 children)

              by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 29 2019, @12:51PM (#848878) Journal
              This. Plus the atmosphere is already heavily reducing due to all that oxygen in the first place. A little more that decomposes rapidly into normal atmospheric components is not going to have a significant affect.
              • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:51PM (1 child)

                by pTamok (3042) on Wednesday May 29 2019, @07:51PM (#849054)

                ...the atmosphere is already heavily reducing due to all that oxygen in the first place

                Reducing? Really?

                Oxygen alone is quite a good oxidising agent. Reducing atmospheres [wikipedia.org] don't tend to contain a lot of it.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday May 30 2019, @06:32PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday May 30 2019, @06:32PM (#849383) Journal

      My concern is actually seeing this come to market. We hear about a lot of gee-whiz stuff that seemingly goes nowhere, and adoption may be slow and sporadic too.

      Often they go nowhere because they're not as good as the hype. TFS indicates that this new material can do some amazing things, but it lacks any hard numbers about how well it actually does those compared to the alternatives. In fact, TFA even points out that the wood is only really compared to untreated lumber, which isn't typically used for construction anyway. Treated lumber is stronger, and would actually be used in the same applications as this new material. Gee, I wonder why they didn't compare against the actual competition..?

      If it can last for decades, who cares how many trees we have to cut down? Just plant more.

      What if the reduction in the greenhouse effect caused by the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere by that tree causes more heat to be radiated away than the amount that would be radiated by one tree's worth of this special wood over its entire lifetime? Younger trees absorb less CO2 than older trees, so if the special reflective wood isn't efficient enough then cutting down and replanting those trees could very well be a net loss. Consider also the extra effort and energy required to produce this wood.

      So, the article does give us one or two numbers. One square meter of this new wood can reflect an average of 53 watts. CO2 is apparently responsible for containing 1.68 watts per square meter globally (https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/science/CO2-and-global-warming-faq.html) with global CO2 levels around 3000 gigatonnes (https://skepticalscience.net/pdf/rebuttal/CO2-emissions-correlation-with-CO2-concentration-intermediate.pdf) and a surface area of 510 trillion square meters, that gives around (1.68 watts * 510 trillion) / (3000 gigatonnes) = 0.2856 watts per kg of CO2. Probably reality is more complicated than that, but hopefully that's close enough. Your average tree will remove 48 pounds (22kg) of CO2 per year (https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm), and the half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ~100 years (from the ucsusa link as above)...so that's 6.2 watts per year from the tree vs 53 watts per square meter from the wood. Seems like a decent random estimate for the amount of lumber in a tree might be around 24 square meters (https://ohioline.osu.edu/factsheet/F-35-02) giving 1272 watts per tree from the new wood material, assuming they can manufacture a square meter panel from a one inch thick slab of wood. It might need to be thicker since they're compressing it. Does still sound like it's kicking the tree's ass, but once you consider that the tree's effect actually compounds year after year...well, it still looks like the tree is getting its ass kicked. So carry on and chop 'em down I guess...if it replaces traditional wood we can mostly ignore harvesting and transportation impacts, although we DO still need to factor in the whole thing about boiling it in peroxide. But I'll leave that for someone else, as I've certainly mangled enough math for one post... :)

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:03PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:03PM (#848665)

    does this mean cutting down more trees

    If they developed this material on anything resembling old-growth cedar or pine, they should be hung by green ropes in Big Sur.

    What this should/likely will mean is growing more trees (in pretty, but ecologically barren tree farms).

    What I want to know is: what do you have to coat this wonder white wood with to keep if from mildewing black, rotting, and becoming food for ants? Or, is this just a building material for the Arizona desert?

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    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:15PM

      by aiwarrior (1812) on Tuesday May 28 2019, @09:15PM (#848667) Journal

      Read the article. The resulting material is a bit far from wood. It actually removes lignin and chemically treats wood to a wood derivate which has quite interesting properties. I doubt that this material is either bio-degradable or ant food :)