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Comment by nurettin | Hacker News Reader

I can believe that wooden construction techniques have improved over the past however so thousands of years. But I can't bring myself to believe that it is environmentally sustainable.

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In countries like Norway, the timber companies replant trees. In addition, the growing trees suck up more carbon in comparison to the older trees. You think that mining is preferable to this practically infinite renewable resource?

It is renewable, but trees take time to grow, and there's only so much space available that's useful for growing those trees. I'm not saying you shouldn't build things out of wood, but the question is how much supply is really reasonably available?

Wood for construction (and paper) is harvested from fast-growing industrial pine plantations. Building with old growth wood is inefficient even if it wasn't socially unacceptable. The demand for that stuff is all in high-end furniture and other decorative items.

Creating building from wood act as a carbon sink, the CO2 is kept in the wood and not released to the air. So using fast growing wood produce negative Co2 output. Also because of among other things, longer growth season from climate change Norway is getting more forest, not less

How much co2 is captured in a 18 story building?

Don't know. But building from wood store co2, building from concrete produce co2. Are probably several papers on this online, and would have been nice to know where to easily check things like this

Why? Compared to concrete, wood is massively lower carbon.

I suppose we could get into the weeds of 'sustainability', in that case, unless you're proposing to stop all construction of any decent height, this is probably the best we can reasonably expect.

Various sources say that lime production for concrete creates around 1/12th of the anthroprogenic atmospheric carbon. On the other hand, wood is a temporary carbon sink until ot burns or decays.

It’s a pretty good carbon sink if you replant the trees.

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