Wooden Buildings Could House the Carbon of the 21st Century

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https://eos.org/articles/wooden-buildings-could-house-the-carbon-of-the-21st-century

Source:  By Jonathan Wosen, Eos/AGU.

Excerpt: To keep carbon out of the atmosphere, researchers argue that we need to return to one of the world’s oldest building materials: wood. ...Steel and concrete remain go-to materials for constructing new homes and commercial buildings. But although these materials are sturdy and durable, their manufacture and transport spew carbon into the atmosphere. ....microbes mastered carbon capture—photosynthesis—more than 3 billion years ago, with the first woody plants developing more than 300 million years ago. Churkina worked with a team of architects and scientists to calculate the benefits of using wood to build urban mid-rise buildings from 2020 to 2050. The team forecast four different scenarios. In the first, dubbed “business as usual,” 99.5% of new buildings would be built with steel and concrete. In the other three scenarios, 10%, 50%, or 90% of new buildings would be made from wood. The researchers estimate that the 90% scenario would keep up to 20 billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere over the next 30 years....

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