Alternative Building Materials—Seeing The Morest From The Trees

[peristaltor]

Just about every time I toured a church or cathedral in Europe years ago and saw beautifully carved pews, screens and other ecclesiastic detritus, I thought about how well such preserved structures sequestered carbon within the wood itself. The trouble, of course, is volume.

Take this example from a Seattle landmark (now demolished). Those curving struts holding the ceiling are laminated and bolted wood, heat pressed and formed by design to give an interior quite a bit more inspiring than the simple drop-down acoustic tile plaguing most interiors. You see them a lot in churches. That's a lot of wood, and that wood sequesters a lot of carbon dioxide. Still, if you want to accelerate such sequestration, you need to think even bigger. For example, skyscraper size.

No one builds wooden skyscrapers. Yeah, why don't we have wooden skyscrapers?

I guess we do, now.

Still, from a goofing-around perspective, wood has its drawbacks. It's more expensive, for one. And it's difficult to mold it into easy-to-use shapes. Now, cardboard? That's easy! I've done that myself. What if one were to scale up from a simple dust collector?

It's a bit more than a dust collector.