MSP71 [] Super Wood: Barking Up The Wrong Tree?

This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9 of the Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury and welcome to MSP. I am indeed sitting in for Mr.

Jeff Sandu this week yet again. Have we been missing the wood for the treats or barking up the wrong tree? Rather than go on with these torturous and pointless idioms all morning, let's cut to the chase. It's long been claimed that trees and forests can play an enormous role in mitigating climate change.

But could they be the solution to everything from lightweight batteries and portable lasers as well? Here to admit he'd never thought about it until this week is MSP's Matt Armitage and I'll ask you first, Matt. Where is Jeff? Hey Rich, he's spending a few pleasant weeks at one of CulturePop's mounting re-education centres.

So we came to the conclusion that his attitude needed a little bit of a readjustment. And because I'm nothing if not benign, I've agreed to let him repay the costs with his servitude once his reorientation is actually complete. How very generous of you. Well, some people have said in the past that I behave like a dictator or a cult leader.

But you know, after my followers go to visit them and demonstrate how diverse I mean, how powerful my love can be, they usually change their minds. Which of course, somehow neatly brings us to wood. Yeah, I like the balance of fear and logic that's brought you to that reasoning. When we talk about wood or at least on technology shows, it's usually in a kind of historical context.

You know, wood was one of the mainstays of our pre-patronium world. To early human society wood meant shelter, it meant the ability to cook and to keep warm. It meant weapons, it meant hunting tools, it meant boats and ships, it meant wagons, it meant wheels. When you look at a country like Malaysia, which is still thickly forested, it's easy to forget that the insatiable hunger for wood stripped much of Europe and other parts of the world of their megaphorists.

So is that the aim for today to argue that to save our future from climate disaster? We should return to agrarian societies with donkeys pulling wooden carts. Have you been watching too much Walking Dead again? Well, you're entirely wrong and remarkably right at the same time.

So not about the Walking Dead thing, although this season has been very, very good. The season finale this wood was a bit damp, but the season's been very, very good. But no, we're actually talking about skyscrapers made of wood. We're talking about cars made of wood.

We're talking even about windows made of wood. Hang on. A wooden window is basically a wall, isn't it? Well, if you could let me speak without the interruptions, then, you know, I might be able to explain myself.

It makes some sense to the people out there. When we think about the next generation materials, we're often talking about nanotear, carbon-based materials, all of these incredible, lab-curated materials that are going to enable us to make twisty buildings that are dozens of kilometres high. I think that's probably an exaggeration, Matthew. You'd be tossed around like you'd do in a storm.

I know it's an absolutely ridiculous idea, but those are the kind of expectations we seem to have of new technologies. We think every new discovery is going to somehow break the law of physics and allow faster than light travel on a BMX. I think you'd need some kind of helmet for that. If only to stop your hair and probably your face from going up in flames.

Not to mention the ET in your basket achieving all the velocity. That would actually have made for a really different movie. ET wouldn't have had to phone home. Elliot could have just cycled him out to one of the Ice Moons at Jupiter.

What does any of this have genuinely to do? Well, I am glad you've asked. Good good good. Because a lot of people might be surprised to find out that wood can do quite a few of the things that we've just discussed.

You know, we don't look at wood as being a high-tech product. We look at it as being the material of yesteryear. It grows, someone comes along and fails it. It's machined and cured and sent out as planks or beams or chips or whatever else.

So wood has a hidden techie side? Yeah, wood is actually at the centre of a new high-tech set of solutions that could help to ween us off our dependence on concrete and steel. But if we're happy with this current concrete set of jungles, why bother? Well, as we move into the zero of megacities, the benefits and weaknesses of that dependence on concrete, especially being laid bare.

So for starters, the vast quantities of sand that are being dug up to feed this concrete monster, the huge amounts of energy required to make it, apparently up to 5% of our greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to come from the production of concrete. Which is amazing. And another 3% from producing steel. So on the one hand, concrete is this cheap and incredibly versatile building material.

But we're increasingly finding that there are these massive drawbacks to building these concrete matropolis. Like heat and drainage, for example. Well, the buildings consume all this energy to build, and then they require more energy to then light and heat or cool. Concrete services on the ground prevent rainwater from draining away.

So it's ironic. The materials we're using to build these cities may actually be contributing to the problems of the materials and the cities. And of course, they can't cope with the actual consequences they're creating. So you think the answer then is to go back to log cabins?

Well, depending on where you live in the world, wood is still a major component, especially in residential house building. In the US timber frame homes are still the norm. But what we're talking about is the next generation. We're actually talking about superwood.

Do we have a superwood? We do. It's a material called cross laminated timber, which is why I'm calling it superwood, because that's a rubbish name. It isn't even that new.

We've been using it since the 1990s. It uses layers of wood glued together. The grain of each sheet is placed at right angles to the sheet above and below it. So that way its properties become regular and become very predictable, which is of course a weakness in normal wood.

You go along the grain and it becomes brittle, you can snap it. Once you do this, you can't. And it actually gives it a similar strength to steel, while being very, very much lighter. We're talking about history.

And one thing we do know is that wood can be a bit of a fire hazard. Well, it can. According to a new scientist piece that I have got a lot of today's information from, the article, it actually says that this kind of wood is actually remarkably fire retardant. So it is treated.

It's not going to burn in that sense. OK. And it also likens making buildings with this CLT material to the process of jenga. You tie these timber sheets on top of each other and you basically stack them.

Now I don't know about you, but whenever I've played jenga, I wouldn't describe the results as stable or especially not live up. No, but the results in the real world are actually a lot stronger than you might imagine. So Vancouver already has an 18-story wooden tower block. Another 18-story building, which is actually slightly taller, is set for completion in Miesa, Norway, literally any time now.

And a 300-meter 80-story tower is planned for London's brutalist masterpiece, the Barbican, which should break ground in the next year or so. And how much will it change the way our cities look? Well, when you start talking about making it in wood, you kind of imagine the world will end up looking like a Swedish sauna or the inside of Ikea. But a lot of the current wooden buildings are pretty stealthy in the way that they look.

There are actually quite a lot of them docked around the world already, but you won't know by looking at them because they tend to be traditionally cloud. And of course, on the inside they're plastered and painted. So in the same ways, you don't see much raw concrete on the inside or outside of buildings. It's the same with wood.

We disguise the material that it's actually made from. What makers do think will embrace the looking feel of wood? Over time, as the buildings become more commonplace, people spend fortune to have wood floors laid on their concrete flooring. Once we get over the preconceptions we have about wood that a skyscraper shouldn't be made out of wood, or that it shouldn't behave in certain ways.

Once we can get past that, then we should see the timber actually being celebrated. We'll get into the environmental aspect then after the breakout. But for now, let's stick with things like, I want to say boring stuff, but not cost of performance. Cost lies, yes.

It's more expensive, but it's much faster to build. So that 18-story tower in Norway was only started last April, and it's almost finished today. So that's less than a year. But the biggest potential for this new technology is in smaller buildings, actually up to eight stories, which could potentially be constructed in a matter of days, because each story can actually be prefabricated off-site.

And because it's so light, you can just lift the entire story into place with a crane and join together. And as we know with similar prefab structures in China, where they're doing prefab concrete structures, you can build in all of your access duds for water and electricity, even for lift shafts. So it's very much a kind of plug-and-play scenario. But it's still more expensive.

On the face of it, yes. But as we said, those emissions, that 5%, that 3%, those were a hidden cost of concrete and steel. So this superwood building, the CLT buildings, on the other hand, will actually lock away carbon for the duration of the building's life. So as a cost per unit, yes, they may be more expensive.

But as a cost to society, they could well be a lot cheaper. And with the skyrocketing cost of sand around the world, concrete construction costs, look as though they're going to be set on this permanent upward trajectory. When we come back then, we'll have a look at the environmental impact of a neo-warden era, and look at what looked like some crazy developments in wood-based materials sites. You are listening to MSP here on BFM 8.5.

Be financially minded. BFM 8.9 BFM 8.9 at the Business Station. My name is Rich Redbury, and this is MSP, and before the break, we were talking about miraculous new construction material called wood. In this part of the show, we're going to look at some of the more magical properties like turning into glass.

That's right, but first, we're going to talk about some of the practicalities. This technology is being billed as a climate saver, but surely it's not eradicating other materials entirely. No, of course not. So we'll stick with construction for a minute.

So buildings are still going to need concrete foundations, for example. So we're still looking at the use of concrete and steel for that part of the construction. But the actual structures will be much lighter because of the wood material. So that means that most buildings will actually require shallower foundations.

So you're even making a saving on the concrete and steel you need for foundation and piling works as well. But these materials aren't carbon neutral, are they? No, of course not. The best solution is not to need them at all.

So for example, generally speaking, environmentally, it's better to make use of existing buildings until the end of their natural lifespan. So even if you're building the world's most green building, if you're ripping up an old concrete lump in order to put it up, that's still going to be inherently wasteful. In the same way, it's often better to keep an old car with shady emission levels, or to buy second-hand, van to buy a new car because of the energy expenditure that goes into making that new product. You know, I do a car show, right?

Yes, I do. Just anyway. So you can send Mr. Daniel Fernandez to talk to me if you need to.

Back to the car show. No, the wood show. The superwood. In fact, the superwood.

So we still have to account for the energy cost of creating material like cross-laminated timber. Of course, not to mention the chemical signature of the glue holding the different layers together, but look at the way the world is expanding, especially in developing countries. If they can make that switch to more carbon neutral or effective construction of all kinds of materials, then everyone's going to be better off in the long run. All right.

One thing that is bothering me is space. If we make this kind of pivot to a natural resource like wood, there are a lot of questions, you know, how do we make sure it's sustainable, that we're not contributing to deforestation? And is there simply enough space? Well, of course, those are all big issues.

I mean, literally in the terms of space. Yeah. That is a big issue. Sustainability is key.

You know, we have to identify types of trees that have the properties we need and are relatively fast growing. You know, you don't want to start chopping down thousands of year old giant redwoods because you fancy an office extension off the kitchen. Right. Right.

Deforestation is something that will have to be handled nation by nation. But in theory, it's a movement that would lead to reforestation, although obviously these will be managed forests rather than wild forests. So yes, there are those concerns about space. Especially with growers prioritizing land to grow biofuels or the sustainable construction materials rather than food production crops.

So there are all sorts of distortions that could take place? Theoretically, but there's also a lot of land that's ripe for reforesting. So new scientists quotes, Himmelau Baral at Indonesia's center of international forestry research, are saying that there's somewhere between one and six billion hectares of land that could be reforested every year. So this is land that either might be degraded, it might be brownfield sites, it might have been previously logged, or it's being otherwise underutilized.

Need you to kind of paint a picture for me of what one billion hectares of land would look like. Okay, and it is a frighteningly large figure and I haven't been able to double check it. But if it was one billion hectares, that would look like the whole of the continental United States of America. You could turn the whole of the US and Canada into new forests for this industry.

And if you want to get closer to that six billion hectares, you add in Russia, China, Brazil, and a bit of a chunk of Australia. And that's the kind of space that we have to reforest. On top of which, countries already operate sustainable forest industries, such as the Scandinavian countries, are often considerably below capacity. So there's room for growth, even within our current production levels.

Now, all right, then, is it at all realistic to look at what is a replacement of fossil fuels? Well, of course, fossil fuels are partly wood anyway. Certainly, it takes a lot less time to regrow trees than it does to make more oil or gas from those trees. So it's far more renewable, in that sense.

What will really win out is how far we can push this technology, how far we can go. Okay, we made some quite large claims at the start of the show. Wouldn't go as a thing as one of them. And that isn't actually as far fetches, it sounds.

Have you visited the Wallenberg Wood Science Centre in Stockholm recently? Not since I went to visit my Swedish fish just a few months ago. Okay, so you might have missed out on the breakthrough that they made in removing the pigmentation from wood, which actually makes it transparent. No, it does not.

Apparently it does. And I know that sounds entirely weird. And it's not as far away from that comment you made about a window made of wood being a wall, because it would still have the insulating properties of wood. It would be great for coal climates, which lose heat through glass, and it would be great for climate control buildings, which lose their cool air through the glass.

Although, you'd probably have to replace those in case of emergency brake glass boxes with chainsaws rather than hammers. And you keep mentioning the petrochemical industry, what would would address that wood? I'll start again. You give me a tongue twister right here.

Would would address that or would it not? Okay, we can all go home now. I've managed to repeat my terribly mangled sentence. That's it.

The show's over. Okay, if anyone is still here, first of all, wood and its byproducts can already be processed into biomass for burning and also into a biofuel that is creating a lot of interest, strangely enough, in the aviation industry. But we're talking about something a little deeper, right? We've been burning wood for millennia.

That's not news, Matt. No, what's more important, possibly, is wood's potential to replace a lot of the petrochemical byproducts. So wood consists of three main chemical components. You've got lignin.

That's about 30%, which has many of the same properties as crude oil and explains why wood makes such a great biofuel. Around 40% is nano cellulose, and the rest is a snatching material called hemicellulose. So lignin is used as the biofuel? Primarily, and there are already some pilot schemes for wood refineries that would separate out all the different chemicals, rather than simply treating them as waste products from other industries using wood.

Because of that similarity to oil, lignin can be used as the base for resins and adhesives amongst a host of other things. So when we mentioned cross-laminated timber needing to be glued, the glue could actually be made from the wood too? Yeah, so you see that circle is actually starting to close. As for the nano cellulose, that's the material that gives wood its strength.

And apparently the fibers are nearly as strong as Kedlar. It's already being used in large quantities in electronics, in packaging and cosmetics, and the use of that looks set to rise as well. I think we mentioned cars earlier. Yeah, car makers are exploring whether nano cellulose could replace glass fibers in bodywork, because it's light, it's strong, it's flexible.

We've already seen BMW making concept cars use nano fabrics for their bodywork. This could be the next step. Our next generation of cars could be a return to those old-fashioned wood-paneled station wagons that we used to see in 1950s shows. In fact, Toyota actually has a wooden concept roser that it plans to debut at the Tokyo Motor Show next year.

That leaves us with the starchy old heme cellulose. Or any cellulose I should say. This is the tough nut to crack, literally. But it's the one with probably the greatest potential to reward the environment.

So a whole host of companies, many of them of course in the Scandinavian region, are trying very hard to turn wood into plastic. A company called Sulepac is already using hemicellulose to manufacture single-use plastic containers. But we're still away off from the holy grail, which is wooden single-use water bottles. And these products would be fully biodegradable?

Yeah, a lot of the current generation of cellulose and other degradable plastic replacements require industrial composting or other techniques to fully recycle them. Wood-based plastics would fully degrade in the ground in about a year. These still aren't the most out there ideas or what though are they? No, there's the material for making aircraft.

Densified wood is another breakthrough. It's a fifth the thickness of traditional wood products. It's 12 times stronger. It's incredibly light.

It's being evaluated as a replacement for steel in machinery with moving parts. And even that's still quite vanilla. Can you imagine wooden batteries? Is this where we close that circle again?

Yeah, one of the chief impediments to electric flight is the weight of the batteries. So what if the plane was made of densified wood? So it was lighter than traditional planes. And then further the weight was saved with lightweight wooden batteries.

Traditional batteries are pretty dense. They're very heavy. In wooden batteries, the components are placed into the pores in the wood. Smart.

Yeah, it sounds like steampunk fiction, but scientists at the University of Maryland are actually working on this. And of course, there is the cookiest item of them all. The wooden laser. Yes, this one really needs some effort to get your head around.

It comes again from our friends at Wallenberg in Stockholm. And they do admit it's a fairly rubbish laser. But it is cheap and it is renewable because most lasers are not cheap and they're not very renewable. I genuinely don't understand how wooden laser works.

And they also admit that they haven't really thought up any particular use for it beyond having fairly useless laser pointers embedded in your chairs and tables. And they did it mostly to prove that they could simply as an exercise to show how versatile wood can truly be. Okay, what do you think the likelihood is that wood could become this enormous environmentally conscious manufacturing material? I think it actually has enormous potential.

We're becoming a lot less cost conscious when it comes to replacing plastics and other materials sourced from petrochemicals. I think concrete could be the next plastic in that sense. The next one that we target to reduce our use of. For a country like Malaysia, where natural resources are a large part of the economy, I think there's huge potential for growth in this sustainable and manageable forest industry that's also going to be very, very profitable.

You know, it goes back to that old saying, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? And now we know the answer is definitely yes. That sound is gaging. There you go, that was Matt Amityj.

Of course, that was MSP. You can also check out culturepop.com for transcripts of these shows. And of course, you can also find out how to bring a bit of Matt's Blaining to your company. Going up in just a few minutes, it is Geek Squad Key on BFM 89.9, the Business Station.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, BFM 89.9, the Business Station.