Unit 3

Wood: the Pluses, the Minuses, and the Neutrals

Hey everyone! This week's blog is fun for me because it's all about lumber, which is something with which I'm very familiar. I spent the first few years of my life in the lumber store that my parents owned, and I've done a lot of woodworking, using lathes with my dad, who's a woodworker and has made a lot of furniture and artistic pieces, and doing construction work on our houses! Because of this experience, I know a bit about different types of wood and their uses; like how cedar is good for siding, pine is good for framing, and hardwoods like white oak and hickory (which is super hard) are good for furniture. However, there was still a lot about wood that I didn't know from my own experience with it. For example, I didn't know about engineered wood or paper products, and I hadn't interacted much with the concept of carbon neutrality. Now that I do and I have, I'm ready to tell you all about it!

Engineered Wood Products
Let's talk about engineered wood! I'm so excited about this material, because its strength makes it an alternative for steel and concrete that can be used in constructing taller buildings, meaning that we can start to have big office buildings and even skyscrapers made of wood! Of course, engineered wood isn't a perfect alternative, and it has its limitations, but it serves well as a material for taller buildings when used alongside other materials like steel and concrete (Sustainable building).
You're probably familiar with some types of engineered wood, such as plywood, particle board and oriented strand board (OSB). 

While you may not recognize it by name, some people-- myself included-- may often mistakenly refer to OSB as plywood.

http://    
                                                                  Plywood                                                   OSB
(Lesson 15)

Plywood is sheets of wood made by gluing together multiple thin layers of wood with the grain directions alternating each layer. The other two that I mentioned, particle board and OSB, are examples of engineered wood products that are made of small pieces of wood glued together. These types of products can be made of pieces as small as sawdust combined with resin, in the case of particle board, or as large as the long strands of wood that make up OSB. (What Is Engineered Wood?) There's also glulam (glue laminated timber) and CLT (cross laminated timber), which are both products made of lumber that's been glued together; the difference is that glulam is made of boards of lumber glued facing the same direction while CLT is made of boards of lumber that are glued in layers with alternating grain direction (Lesson 15).
While they can't serve as the sole material for everything, these many new wood products allow for wood to be used for a lot more things, bringing value to the wood industry, and they are often made of waste, making them more sustainable (Lesson 15). 

Paper Products
You most likely know that paper comes from trees. But how much do you know about the process through which this transformation occurs? Allow me to break it down into three main steps. First, the raw material (meaning the trees), are prepared by debarking the logs and cutting them up into wood chips. Second, these chips are turned into wood pulp either mechanically (primarily through grinding) or chemically (primarily through chemical solutions and heat). And third, often after the pulp has been bleached to result in white paper, the pulp is consolidated on a paper machine, which converts the pulp into paper. (Lesson 16)
Paper production is incredibly important, as each year over 400 million tons of paper are used worldwide, and in 2022 the US used about 65.76 million tons of paper (How Much Paper). A great thing about paper is that it's recyclable! Recycling paper reduces its environmental impacts, making its usage more sustainable. 

Carbon Neutrality
Now that we know how much wood is used for, we're encouraged to ask the question, Is wood good? Is wood a sustainable material whose usage we want to increase? A good start to determining whether wood is "good" as a resource is examining the amount of carbon captured by living trees and the amount produced by the wood products made from them. 
(Lesson 17)
Overall, trees are carbon neutral, meaning their materials produce about the same amount of carbon that they capture during their lives. In comparison to other materials, this state of being carbon neutral is far better than producing more carbon than they ever captured. Therefore, we can definitively say that as far as materials go in terms of sustainability, wood is definitely good! (Lesson 17)

Now we all know more about wood, and hopefully you're on your way to loving lumber as much as I do. Thanks for reading and see y'all next time!


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Resources - in order of appearance

1. Kleiner, Kurt, Sustainable building effort reaches new heights with wooden skyscrapers, November 8, 2024, yaleclimateconnections.org

2. Lesson 15: Engineered Wood Products, BBE 1002, UMN

3. Riha, John, What Is Engineered Wood?, hgtv.com

4. Lesson 16: Paper Products, BBE 1002, UMN

5. How Much Paper Is Used Each Year?, August 5, 2024, tonerbuzz.com

6. Lesson 17: Is Wood Good?, BBE 1002, UMN



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