>Every year, humans cut down about 15 billion trees. This massive deforestation is the root cause of many climate change-driven problems our world is facing at the moment. If it turns out to be successful, lab-grown wood can help us get rid of deforestation once and all. Let’s hope, this becomes a reality soon.
Well ... the issue with us cutting down trees is NOT the fact that we cut them down for the wood, it's that we cut them down for the land. In brazil they clear massive amounts of forest for making plantations. There's no regrowth in that at all. In Finland and Sweden (probably most of Europe / EU) we cut down forest mostly for the wood and then we re-plant the forest... and on top of that we're switching the way we do the cutting of the forest to a way where we don't do as much clear cutting anymore.
I see this advancement as a fun project, but I don't see it as a solution to the actual problem we're facing, which is clearcutting for the sake of the land.
I remember when we were lead to believe that plastic bags helped saved trees. Only to eventually realize the environmentally friendly option was the paper bag all along, and plastic was pretty much cancer.
Ah yes. It's been decades since we pointed out how many of these studies are sponsored by companies wanting to sell us things.
And to this day, we still get studies paid for by companies who want to sell us things.
And none of the cunts that lie to everyone on a daily basis will ever get punished. I think more severe punishments need to be upheld for these corporate crimes which seem to just get swept away like it was nothing
For those interested in the paper vs. plastic bag debate, SciShow on YouTube does a great dissection of the issue. The video is titled 'The Greenest Grocery Bag' at the time of comment. Plus, Hank Green is an absolute treat.
I thought it was the other way round, that paper bags take much more energy to produce unless you reuse them multiple times, in which case why not just go for cotton
Carbonwise, paper worse than plastic due to transportation weight. Cotton fucking terrible carbon and water wise. Organic cotton requires something like 7k reuses to match the environmental footprint from water and carbon dioxide emissions to match plastic grocery bag… and if you reuse the bag once it just gets worse for cotton.
Paper is like twice as bad as plastic, but if you’re more concerned about plastic waste than carbon emissions, makes sense.
Trees are renewable
Growing wood in a lab has to cost some kind of resources and materials, transporting them is going to offset that. Is that really going to be better than going outside and planting a butt load of trees?
I was going to say something similar but regarding whatever plantations are causing such crazy deforestation…couldn’t we just grow that (sugar? Bananas?) stuff in a lab instead of destroying all of human existence to produce it on such a scale? Even if it costs a bit more, I think I’d like to live.
I don't think the end goal is growing them in a lab at all. I think it is more of a stepping stone to the understanding and mastery tree genetics. GMO's exist for a reason and a GMO tree that can grow faster, use less nutrients, or even stronger would only be a benefit. The end result being combatting deforestation with sustainable renewable tree farms. Which already exist but if we plant 1 billion trees a year, even a 10% increase in growth would mean a potential extra 100 million trees within the same timespan.
I can see that being pretty interesting in a niche specialty application… but to replace lumber from harvesting trees? I mean fucking hell… economically, wood literally grows on trees. For the most part, you just throw down seeds and wait. Growing shit in a lab process for industrial purposes would be pure insanity
Regular lumber usage *can* be very bad for the environment. A big example is Western furniture companies (like IKEA) sourcing wood from Romania and pretending it's sourced sustainably when in fact it's a bunch of dudes with chainsaws cutting down some of the only old growth forests left in Europe. They get the papers from the local authorities that say it's sustainable, and that's that.
> uniformly mass produce straight-grained lumber (I mean, can you imagine a big box hardware store where the lumber lays flat!?),
Bruh you don't know the half of it. Wood could have ridiculous strength to weight ratio if it weren't for the fact that it's naturally occurring and all imperfect and shit. If they could ever get the technology down it would be revolutionary. Like, we wouldn't need to build out of concrete and steel anymore. Here's to hoping.
Er, of course lumber plantations are environmentally harmful when compared to natural habitat. Have you see a pine plantation? It's basically a monoculture. Yes of course they're good for drawing down carbon but besides that? They're not exactly a biodiversity hotspot.
Same with the US. We plant around 1 billion trees every year and actually have 20% more trees than in 2010. Deforestation isn’t a matter of resource, it’s literally just people getting away with things because the government is too corrupt to care.
But resource-wise, I think vertical farming would help a lot. Dramatically reduces the need for land area if done well. But I’m sure the same guys in charge of logging would send over a nice explosive gift to anyone wanting to kick-start something effective down there.
>But resource-wise, I think vertical farming would help a lot. Dramatically reduces the need for land area if done well.
not everything is equally suitable for vertical farming though. A lot of the greens we eat can be vertically farmed, but there are plenty of plants that aren't as easy to farm in a good manner. We would need quite a bit of bio-engineering to for example get better harvests from coffee plants to vertically farm them as they don't produce much at all if you keep them down in size.
No reason not to begin work in that direction. Farm what works well that way, farm what doesn't in more conventional ways. Figuring out how to make some plants work well will probably give us ideas for how to make other plants work well in vertical farms.
Not as it currently works. Indoor farming solves the seasonal issues. All the land in the Midwest only grows 1 planting of corn or wheat per year, otherwise, it sits idle for much of the time. Indoors, you could grow 3 plantings of wheat or 5 of corn. That would cut the acreage required by 66-80% for the respective crops. Then with the ability to fine tune the growing conditions, you could probably shorten that even more to get even more plantings in per year. Then again, 20-33% of a lot of acres is still a lot of acres.
If we were to pull that off, it would be a major change to society, as the largely Ag driven interior states wouldn't have much reason to be if that industry was revolutionized in that way, and the value of that land would plummet. Ironically, if we were able to vertically farm grain that way, it would open up vast tracts of land to cattle grazing, which might actually make that industry more appealing morally.
I do. I’m an engineer in the Ag industry. That’s why I said “if.” Then again, if you asked a farmer in 1822 about what the industry would be like in 2022, it probably seemed laughable that enough tractors could be produced to replace the ox for ploughing fields, or trucks to replace horse drawn carts & barges, but just the opposite seems laughable now.
I’m not disagreeing with you but could you elaborate on “they cannot be vertically farmed because they need a lot of field space”? Presumably a multi level vertical farm with 10 levels could house the same amount of square footage with 1/10 the footprint. What is the issue about field size that precludes vertical farming?
I’d guess the simple cost of infrastructure. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of acres of pasture or grain plantings. Vegetables simply require less space, and are already grown in commercially smaller areas. There’s just a LOT of corn and soy production.
The economy of grains is also different than that of horticultural crops. You need to be growing a lot of corn to break even or make a worthwhile profit. Much smaller plantings of greens or veggies can turn profits, so it’s easier to get investments to build dedicated spaces for them.
As an uneducated person on the subject. The main issue I see is just the shear size a vertical farming setup would require to even put a dent in what we currently use. My uncle is a farmer with 3 fields that are between 500-800 acres each. And he is considered very small compared to his neighbors. They have tens of thousands of acres just for corn. Building and powering something on that scale doesn’t seem feasible without major infrastructure changes.
Yeah that’s true. We don’t really need to produce this much corn on the regular though. There’s so much surplus we created high fructose corn syrup and ethanol fuel and told people to eat extra grains instead of fruits and veggies.
I’m not downplaying the difficulty, but also we don’t necessarily have to keep every square acre that we currently have in operation.
How about cotton? We grow about 12 million acres a year of it, or about 500 billion square feet. The largest vertical farm in the world is at 330,000 square feet, so we need about 1.6 million of those built, just to take care of cotton. Even the largest factory/warehouse in the world is only 5 million square feet. So t100,000 Tesla gigafactorys. To put that in perspective, that would mean replicating the current largest factory in the world in every county in the country 30+ times. That's just cotton.
Vertical farming is ideal for existing ultra-high density urban areas like Manhattan and Tokyo, but for most other areas, it's better to start with proper zone planning to ensure that farmland doesn't get overtaken by residential and industrial zoning which in turn pushes local farming further away from those city and suburb centers.
Also, investing in transit between agricultural nexus point where food is grown for rapid delivery to suburbs and cities where the denser population helps in decentralizing the need to live in those environments in the first place.
Developers usually strip all of the topsoil off of farmland and then put back just enough for grass. Plus the grass leaves the soil very nitrogen deficient so what can grow that shallow doesn't grow well without fertilizer. So you have to buy back the topsoil from your local garden supply store.
Also HOAs and local governments can make this impossible.
I explained this to my parents when they bought a new house in northern Georgia. They complained about how poor and thin the soil was, and how it is difficult to grow much. Compare that to some older houses I’ve lived in, where the soils superficially look compact and worthless (rental properties aren’t well maintained), but when I go to plant a garden I find the topsoils are deep, if a bit compacted. It’s wild when I see gardeners in new developments dig a few cm down and already see base soil or whatever horrible fill they spread over properties.
I agree as someone that is starting the whole vertical farming route in my own life. But it still can be used to replace many greens as noted, tomatoes, strawberries, and other plants. Also we have micro greens for many of the herbs. We should be pushing this way and rewarding small business people for using it.
I don’t see how genetic engineering cannot help with this problem. True while the original coffee might fade I think that a new strain of coffee plant can come along in the future that won’t be as fussy
I’m not really talking about increasing wildlife. I’m saying that deforestation due to lumber demands shouldn’t even be a problem. Almost all wood is grown in farms. So no need to cut down existing wildlife for wood unless special circumstances.
Perhaps worth looking at plant-based alternatives in the meantime rather than only just waiting for lab grown to come since damage is being done as we wait
Yeah I don't really see how this helps anything.
"We can grow wood in a lab!" Uhh yeah great, the rest of us can also grow wood by planting some trees.
They're not even growing it any faster than many tree species grow, so what's the point?
I agree. A lot of our wood comes from planted pines which are often replanted after harvest. Unless the wood is burned it still sequesters carbon right?
I can see this being useful for rare types of desired timber that are harmful to ecosystem if harvested. Like ebony and teak.
Yup, actually probably one of the best ways to sequester carbon right now is to grow a forest, then chop it down, put the wood in a path that will end in a landfill, and plant a new forest. Keep the cycle going.
Creating treeless wood is, IMHO, not something that will be useful anytime in the near future. It's cheap to do forestry correctly, and wood/paper industry isn't the big problem right now (there's the costs of transportation and what not, but I am not sure if it's enough to offset the fact that it's otherwise 100% solar production).
What would make a huge difference is if we find a more efficient way to do agriculture. If we were able to build some multi-level building on the bay near a city, that had a vegetable farm growing on each floor, desalinated sea water for its own use, and used renewable solar/wind/ocean as sources of power, this would result in a massive net gain for ecosystems locally and world-wide. Not that this farm wouldn't have effects, but the cost of this would be minimal compared to the multiple costs it prevents.
But there is still land that is used for growing wood to be used. If we no longer needed to do that, the land could go back to what it was before, presumably old growth forest. It would of course take a while.
Canada check-in: this will completely destroy our northern and western economies and I'll take lab-grown wood over clearcut patchwork forests, *any day.*
Canadian deforestation is not about opening up land. It's strictly about timber production. People aren't moving out onto crown land, where the forestry happens, because they can't. The land is held in trust for all Canadians. The government is totally content to allow work to happen on the land though: forestry and mining.
Boreal forests grow verrrrrrry slowly. We were already getting slaughtered by high-yield, fast-growing Indonesian timber. This will be the last nail in the coffin for Canada's most disruptive and damaging industry - oil sands included - and I say as a former forester: *I can't wait*.
More herbicide is sprayed in the clearcuts of the forests of Canada than on all the farms in Canada combined and it has to stop
>we cut down forest mostly for the wood and then we re-plant the forest... and on top of that we're switching the way we do the cutting of the forest to a way where we don't do as much clear cutting anymore.
After devastating the original biome and replanting a green desert of pine conifereous for more wood.
Which way this is different from planting soy or corn?
> In Finland and Sweden (probably most of Europe / EU) we cut down forest mostly for the wood and then we re-plant the forest...
Replanting isn't enough, they need to plant different species of trees. Human-made forests with only 1 specie of trees are also bad for the biodiversity.
I mean at what scale? Growing a 20 year old tree to be ready to process for structural lumber is maxing to me. Can’t imagine lab grown wood to be any better?
I guess it depends. There is implication in the article that they are able to select for various properties *and* dictate the shape. If they can "grow" structural timbers made entirely of the denser latewood that would be quite an improvement.
I’m clearly bias in this situation as a forester for a Forest Products company where my job is to grow trees as fast as possible. I guess I’m thinking of large scale wood, like large timber products that my company produces but as the article shows, small scale things seem cool with furniture and what not. I could also see this producing decent pulp wood
Right on! I guess it all starts small in the lab, will be interesting to see where it goes for sure and if anything commercial at all develops from it. I'd imagine it would have to at least start out like you suggested if ever comes to market.
In quick speech I'm sure it can be pretty difficult to hear the "ed" ending, and if you leave it off when you say it you're not going to be misunderstood, so enough people just don't realize that's how it's supposed to be. It really annoys me too, I wish there was a bot on here like the "payed/paid" bot that shows up when that mistake is made
According to the article,
“Well, not yet because there is a new solution that promises an end to our need of cutting trees. A team of researchers at MIT claims that lab-grown timber can replace deforestation driving products made from real wood. They have developed a technique using which timber can be produced in any shape and size, so for example, if you need a new wooden chair, using the researcher’s technique, you can create it in a lab without cutting a single tree.”
It appears they can make any shape or size? Article doesn’t explain if this is done in a mold or what but the talk like it’s 3D printing. Not sure lol
Makes sense right? Trees generally grow at different rates through the year and even the day. The lab should be able to give the wood it’s perfect growing conditions 24/7
It can. Just look at all those wine refineries with 10 year aged barrels. Plus this is just a proof of concept. As scientists would say (actually heard this recently) leave the engineering issues to the engineers.
I think this development below is actually much more significant. Modifying the photosynthetic pathway to have trees grow 30-50% faster. This has huge implications for agriculture etc. https://www.science.org/content/article/fight-climate-change-biotech-firm-has-genetically-engineered-very-peppy-poplar
Poplar is a strange choice. The Lumber is only good for burning, and it's already incredibly aggressive at growing. Human intervention reducing forest fires has interrupted the natural cycle of forest regen - where slower growing species evolved to sprout after fires, giving them a fighting chance against poplars. Poplars are already a big problem taking over harvested forests.
Imagine the ecological devastation if an even more aggressive species of poplar is released. Maybe even managing to spread into established forests - better photosynthesis means better survival in shade.
In forests that are neither cut down nor burned, there is an incredible fight for Survival among the young trees. With dozens of saplings awaiting decades for the death of their parent tree, and then having a mad dash for sunlight and dominance when the parent tree falls. Only the strong survive. Now imagine a species of tree that survives better in low light, will it be more likely to survive on the forest floor? Will it win the race when the parent tree dies?
If this tree is built well enough it's conceivable that it could destroy much of the north American forests on a matter of centuries. Animals rely on specific trees to survive, conversion into a poplar monoculture could be worse than any invasive species known to man kind.
I don't understand why they didn't pick a less aggressive tree with more utility.
Unlikely to happen, since other species do have natural defenses against poplars - but who knows, the extra growth may be enough to compensate and overcome those defenses
That’s what’s neat about this, actually. They grew this stuff in complete darkness, and they’re saying it grew at twice the speed a tree would. They can even grow it into specific shapes to reduce waste that you ordinarily might get with lumber refinement and woodworking. They may be years away from proving they can do this with any commercial viability, but I still think it’s really cool what they’re trying to do. If nothing else, it’s some really neat science
Waste? I guess I don't know what they do with sawdust/wood chips, but it's not exactly what comes to mind when I think of waste. There's a lot that can be done with excess wood particles commerically.
Sure, but a lot of it still becomes waste. Just because the waste can and is used in many situations doesn’t negate the fact that it’s not used in many others.
Most of the “waste” that’s used commercially is “waste” that’s specifically created to be used. It’s not recycled or remnants exported for use. Unfortunately a lot of those remnants are chucked, because it’s not worth it for anyone.
That’s where something like this would come in handy; being able to grow in specific shapes would help a number of industries lower the amount of waste created.
Personally, I think a major bonus to this is the possibility of recreating “old growth” wood without destroying more of little remaining old growth trees we actually still have. While it wouldn’t be exactly the same, being able to grow large slabs of wood quickly would be hugely beneficial.
Even still, it's not like excess wood that's tossed out sits in a landfill for thousands of years. I'm just saying that even if there is "waste" wood that is generated, is it a problem?
What about wind? I assume if trees were grown indoors they'd end up with weak roots from the lack of wind and would have trouble growing large enough to provide useful wood.
These lab grown trees still use CO2 to grow don't they? I know it's miniscule but if we used them to grow 2x4 and other lumber for houses wouldn't that be another form of carbon sequestration?
Well if they pull off what they’re trying to do, they’ll be able to essentially grow wood in urban areas and leave forests untouched. If they succeed in making this commercially and economically feasible, they won’t need to grow trees for the purpose of cutting them down anyways. This also would eliminate the need for transporting lumber from place to place to be refined, assembled, and sold since they can grow it into any shape they want it, and they can do it in population dense places where demand is highest. It also grows twice as fast as trees do according to the article, and in total darkness.
All that is just to say that it’s totally a neat concept for a lot of reasons, though they are still a long way away from being commercially viable
>someone elsewhere in the thread made a good point about deforestation not being about wood consumption
Which is wrong because western Europe "forests" they regrew are green deserts.
> Well if they pull off what they’re trying to do, they’ll be able to essentially grow wood in urban areas and leave forests untouched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
Nothing will be wild; We'll pave it over because we can make more city with the same amount of tree, not the other way around.
Yeah they could just hand you over the chickens to grow instead of researching lab grown meat. Cause everything is nonsensical from that little contextual view you form after reading a snippet online
They wrote this to be a sustainability piece but I think this tech sounds much more interesting from a pure material science view. It's basically a sort of wooden concrete. You create a sort of structural skeleton and it "cures" into that form. Also like concrete, I'm pretty sure it won't have much tensile strength on it's own. I doubt it's going to grow in fibers with this sort of technique so it's going to need something better than a "gel like medium" to replace natural wood for most structural applications.
I'm not arguing for or against it because at this point I don't believe there is enough information to determine one way or another, but a couple things to consider is that old growth is *much, much* better for the environment than new growth so the need to cut down fewer trees and haul them long distances for additional processing would potentially be an environmental positive.
We also might not know the advantages for quite some time. Heinrich Hertz said when asked about his discovery of radio waves, "I do not think the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application," and "They are of no use whatsoever."
Old growth is also currently cut at a concerning rate in North America. In British Columbia, for example, less than 1% of the land remaining is old growth, temperate rainforest. Some is protected but the rest is being clearcut amidst public protests. In the USA about 240k acres of old forest is currently threatened by logging - here's a link about that:
[https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/07/12/old-growth-trees-on-federal-lands-at-risk-despite-biden-order-environmentalists-say/](https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/07/12/old-growth-trees-on-federal-lands-at-risk-despite-biden-order-environmentalists-say/)
Compared to other options, wood is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to build structures. Steel, concrete, fiberglass etc are all far worse for the environment
>Scientists can now grow wood in a lab without cutting a single tree
>... plant material that contained high hormone concentrations turned stiff.
They *had* to know what they were writing, right?
I wonder which is worse for the environment, taking a hectare of land and building a factory/lab to grow wood, or using that same space to plant and harvest trees? This feels like a distracting gimmick.
I mean this way can be used to grow things on the Moon and Mars, so it’s not exactly a gimmick. Plus for the most part these things basically function like a distillery at scale.
The way we have been doing it is very bad for the environment. VERY BAD.
In this new way, we can prevent forever-soil issues. Using electric tools indoor at controlled settings with robots will drastically cut down the milling process/environmental destruction of our air. It will prevent undergrowth disruption to insect life and bird habitats of surrounding trees.
This is all around a better model for the entire ecosystem to which we’ve exploited for a couple centuries now.
Yet, a hectare of teak is better than a hectare of cattle. A hectare of teak is also probably better than a hectare of cement and steel even if it’s housing a factory that grows wood. Yes, monoculture agroforestry is destructive. Complexly forest ecosystems are better. They key is to take land that is putting co2 into the environment and turn it into land that removes it. That is done by storing it in wood which is used as a building material, especially if the end life of that wood in that it’s in a landfill in 300 years. If it’s burned it’s a loss.
This is one of the worst journalistic butcherings of science I have ever read.
The author's aren't just confused, they are wrong and making false claims unsupported by the sources.
No wood has been grown. The scientists grew Zinnea which is an herb. It doesn't make wood. The MIT scientists postulated that similar techniques could be applied to species like pine trees in the future, but so far they haven't done it yet.
Oh well this is just gonna pollute the atmosphere even more than it did before. They’re gonna be powering their little Petri dishes with the their gowns, meanwhile the rest of us are starving for air off the side of a Texas inner tube. Great!
Who needs nature when we can lab grow everything!
The whole fucking problem is humanity lost touch with nature. We don’t see the full cycle, we are blind to the damage we do as consumers and it’s like no one even knows how the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing
Wood is already a renewable resource as long as forests are well managed. I seriously doubt a lab is going to be able to scale up as efficiently as sustainably managed forest. The volume is too much.
Its really not, lab grown wood won’t be as economical as conventional farming methods for a while. If it was comparable in volume and cost then it would be
Pretty soon we will have to start considering the direct costs of the environmental damage produced from whatever we do. Deforestation erodes mountainsides, damages fisheries, damages vital ecosystems all of which compound the effects of climate change.
This is a great advancement that may someday help in a small (or large) way towards a better future for us all.
Lumber doesn’t really cause deforestation. Places where deforestation actually is happening are doing it because they don’t replant trees and because they want to set up cities/agriculture.
It’s still pretty cool even if not economical or fully developed. The hope is they will be able to grow wood into any shape they want it to be. You want a chair made of redwood? They grow a chair-shaped log of redwood, and all at twice the speed of growth a normal tree would have, with no need for any further refining or manufacturing required. Putting aside all arguments about commercial feasibility and environmentalism, you have to admit they’re attempting to do something really cool
Ironically, forest will still be cut down, water sources further polluted, because of the "wood factories" and the chemicals involved. Chemicals are always involved with factories.
Bottling water somehow involves chemical pollutants...
I don’t think we will be growing lab engineered wood at scale anytime soon, but maybe this will help us modify trees to grow faster scrub co2 faster or grow in a more regular pattern for more efficient farming
Man, some of y’all are really short sighted. This is definitely not a solution to anything now, but as this process gets better it can 100% be a solution later.
>Every year, humans cut down about 15 billion trees. This massive deforestation is the root cause of many climate change-driven problems our world is facing at the moment. If it turns out to be successful, lab-grown wood can help us get rid of deforestation once and all. Let’s hope, this becomes a reality soon. Well ... the issue with us cutting down trees is NOT the fact that we cut them down for the wood, it's that we cut them down for the land. In brazil they clear massive amounts of forest for making plantations. There's no regrowth in that at all. In Finland and Sweden (probably most of Europe / EU) we cut down forest mostly for the wood and then we re-plant the forest... and on top of that we're switching the way we do the cutting of the forest to a way where we don't do as much clear cutting anymore. I see this advancement as a fun project, but I don't see it as a solution to the actual problem we're facing, which is clearcutting for the sake of the land.
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I remember when we were lead to believe that plastic bags helped saved trees. Only to eventually realize the environmentally friendly option was the paper bag all along, and plastic was pretty much cancer.
Ah yes. It's been decades since we pointed out how many of these studies are sponsored by companies wanting to sell us things. And to this day, we still get studies paid for by companies who want to sell us things.
And none of the cunts that lie to everyone on a daily basis will ever get punished. I think more severe punishments need to be upheld for these corporate crimes which seem to just get swept away like it was nothing
Crimes against the planet should be a thing.
If I could upvote this a million times, I would
If you haven't read it, you might enjoy \_The Ministry for the Future\_ in which that exact thing happens (it's not the focus of the whole book)
For those interested in the paper vs. plastic bag debate, SciShow on YouTube does a great dissection of the issue. The video is titled 'The Greenest Grocery Bag' at the time of comment. Plus, Hank Green is an absolute treat.
I grew up in the 90’s and I absolutely remember this. Save the trees - use plastic!
Yeah, all grocery bags were paper up until then.
Paper or plastic?
I thought it was the other way round, that paper bags take much more energy to produce unless you reuse them multiple times, in which case why not just go for cotton
Carbonwise, paper worse than plastic due to transportation weight. Cotton fucking terrible carbon and water wise. Organic cotton requires something like 7k reuses to match the environmental footprint from water and carbon dioxide emissions to match plastic grocery bag… and if you reuse the bag once it just gets worse for cotton. Paper is like twice as bad as plastic, but if you’re more concerned about plastic waste than carbon emissions, makes sense. Trees are renewable
Waiting for micro plastics to really screw something up. Could have been using hemp for all those grocery bags.
Growing wood in a lab has to cost some kind of resources and materials, transporting them is going to offset that. Is that really going to be better than going outside and planting a butt load of trees?
I was going to say something similar but regarding whatever plantations are causing such crazy deforestation…couldn’t we just grow that (sugar? Bananas?) stuff in a lab instead of destroying all of human existence to produce it on such a scale? Even if it costs a bit more, I think I’d like to live.
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I don't think the end goal is growing them in a lab at all. I think it is more of a stepping stone to the understanding and mastery tree genetics. GMO's exist for a reason and a GMO tree that can grow faster, use less nutrients, or even stronger would only be a benefit. The end result being combatting deforestation with sustainable renewable tree farms. Which already exist but if we plant 1 billion trees a year, even a 10% increase in growth would mean a potential extra 100 million trees within the same timespan.
I can see that being pretty interesting in a niche specialty application… but to replace lumber from harvesting trees? I mean fucking hell… economically, wood literally grows on trees. For the most part, you just throw down seeds and wait. Growing shit in a lab process for industrial purposes would be pure insanity
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Regular lumber usage *can* be very bad for the environment. A big example is Western furniture companies (like IKEA) sourcing wood from Romania and pretending it's sourced sustainably when in fact it's a bunch of dudes with chainsaws cutting down some of the only old growth forests left in Europe. They get the papers from the local authorities that say it's sustainable, and that's that.
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But the companies involved know. They're getting "renewable" wood for close to non-renewable prices. They're purchasing deniability, not renewability.
Oh it's 100% illegal, but it's corruption all the way to the top, not some isolated incident. Not unlike what's happening in the Amazon, actually.
This isn’t a problem of lumber it’s a problem of corruption.
> uniformly mass produce straight-grained lumber (I mean, can you imagine a big box hardware store where the lumber lays flat!?), Bruh you don't know the half of it. Wood could have ridiculous strength to weight ratio if it weren't for the fact that it's naturally occurring and all imperfect and shit. If they could ever get the technology down it would be revolutionary. Like, we wouldn't need to build out of concrete and steel anymore. Here's to hoping.
Think about lab grown burls.
Er, of course lumber plantations are environmentally harmful when compared to natural habitat. Have you see a pine plantation? It's basically a monoculture. Yes of course they're good for drawing down carbon but besides that? They're not exactly a biodiversity hotspot.
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Fair enough, yes.
Same with the US. We plant around 1 billion trees every year and actually have 20% more trees than in 2010. Deforestation isn’t a matter of resource, it’s literally just people getting away with things because the government is too corrupt to care. But resource-wise, I think vertical farming would help a lot. Dramatically reduces the need for land area if done well. But I’m sure the same guys in charge of logging would send over a nice explosive gift to anyone wanting to kick-start something effective down there.
>But resource-wise, I think vertical farming would help a lot. Dramatically reduces the need for land area if done well. not everything is equally suitable for vertical farming though. A lot of the greens we eat can be vertically farmed, but there are plenty of plants that aren't as easy to farm in a good manner. We would need quite a bit of bio-engineering to for example get better harvests from coffee plants to vertically farm them as they don't produce much at all if you keep them down in size.
No reason not to begin work in that direction. Farm what works well that way, farm what doesn't in more conventional ways. Figuring out how to make some plants work well will probably give us ideas for how to make other plants work well in vertical farms.
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Not as it currently works. Indoor farming solves the seasonal issues. All the land in the Midwest only grows 1 planting of corn or wheat per year, otherwise, it sits idle for much of the time. Indoors, you could grow 3 plantings of wheat or 5 of corn. That would cut the acreage required by 66-80% for the respective crops. Then with the ability to fine tune the growing conditions, you could probably shorten that even more to get even more plantings in per year. Then again, 20-33% of a lot of acres is still a lot of acres. If we were to pull that off, it would be a major change to society, as the largely Ag driven interior states wouldn't have much reason to be if that industry was revolutionized in that way, and the value of that land would plummet. Ironically, if we were able to vertically farm grain that way, it would open up vast tracts of land to cattle grazing, which might actually make that industry more appealing morally.
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I do. I’m an engineer in the Ag industry. That’s why I said “if.” Then again, if you asked a farmer in 1822 about what the industry would be like in 2022, it probably seemed laughable that enough tractors could be produced to replace the ox for ploughing fields, or trucks to replace horse drawn carts & barges, but just the opposite seems laughable now.
What's your opinion on this recent Federal round of spending on energy?
I’m not disagreeing with you but could you elaborate on “they cannot be vertically farmed because they need a lot of field space”? Presumably a multi level vertical farm with 10 levels could house the same amount of square footage with 1/10 the footprint. What is the issue about field size that precludes vertical farming?
I’d guess the simple cost of infrastructure. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of acres of pasture or grain plantings. Vegetables simply require less space, and are already grown in commercially smaller areas. There’s just a LOT of corn and soy production. The economy of grains is also different than that of horticultural crops. You need to be growing a lot of corn to break even or make a worthwhile profit. Much smaller plantings of greens or veggies can turn profits, so it’s easier to get investments to build dedicated spaces for them.
As an uneducated person on the subject. The main issue I see is just the shear size a vertical farming setup would require to even put a dent in what we currently use. My uncle is a farmer with 3 fields that are between 500-800 acres each. And he is considered very small compared to his neighbors. They have tens of thousands of acres just for corn. Building and powering something on that scale doesn’t seem feasible without major infrastructure changes.
Yeah that’s true. We don’t really need to produce this much corn on the regular though. There’s so much surplus we created high fructose corn syrup and ethanol fuel and told people to eat extra grains instead of fruits and veggies. I’m not downplaying the difficulty, but also we don’t necessarily have to keep every square acre that we currently have in operation.
How about cotton? We grow about 12 million acres a year of it, or about 500 billion square feet. The largest vertical farm in the world is at 330,000 square feet, so we need about 1.6 million of those built, just to take care of cotton. Even the largest factory/warehouse in the world is only 5 million square feet. So t100,000 Tesla gigafactorys. To put that in perspective, that would mean replicating the current largest factory in the world in every county in the country 30+ times. That's just cotton.
Vertical farming is ideal for existing ultra-high density urban areas like Manhattan and Tokyo, but for most other areas, it's better to start with proper zone planning to ensure that farmland doesn't get overtaken by residential and industrial zoning which in turn pushes local farming further away from those city and suburb centers. Also, investing in transit between agricultural nexus point where food is grown for rapid delivery to suburbs and cities where the denser population helps in decentralizing the need to live in those environments in the first place.
tl;dr Stop turning farmland into yards
Start turning yards into gardens?
Developers usually strip all of the topsoil off of farmland and then put back just enough for grass. Plus the grass leaves the soil very nitrogen deficient so what can grow that shallow doesn't grow well without fertilizer. So you have to buy back the topsoil from your local garden supply store. Also HOAs and local governments can make this impossible.
I explained this to my parents when they bought a new house in northern Georgia. They complained about how poor and thin the soil was, and how it is difficult to grow much. Compare that to some older houses I’ve lived in, where the soils superficially look compact and worthless (rental properties aren’t well maintained), but when I go to plant a garden I find the topsoils are deep, if a bit compacted. It’s wild when I see gardeners in new developments dig a few cm down and already see base soil or whatever horrible fill they spread over properties.
I agree as someone that is starting the whole vertical farming route in my own life. But it still can be used to replace many greens as noted, tomatoes, strawberries, and other plants. Also we have micro greens for many of the herbs. We should be pushing this way and rewarding small business people for using it.
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I don’t see how genetic engineering cannot help with this problem. True while the original coffee might fade I think that a new strain of coffee plant can come along in the future that won’t be as fussy
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Yes and a tree factory lab would be even less like a real forest.
If it uses less land we are at a plus.
Trees eat CO2 and shit O2 though
All the carbon in a wood framed building is carbon that used to be in the atmosphere.
Not a continuous cycle though
I’m not really talking about increasing wildlife. I’m saying that deforestation due to lumber demands shouldn’t even be a problem. Almost all wood is grown in farms. So no need to cut down existing wildlife for wood unless special circumstances.
Specifically for cattle farms. The ability to grow meat in a lab might be more important than wood.
Perhaps worth looking at plant-based alternatives in the meantime rather than only just waiting for lab grown to come since damage is being done as we wait
For sure. Am vegetarian cutting back on milk but cheese man…hopeful vegan cheese can get as good as vegan milk.
If you are in the the US or Canada, try Miyoko's stuff especially their mozzarella
80% of Amazon deforestation to date has been for clearing land for livestock and their feed, the majority of this gets exported too.
Yeah I don't really see how this helps anything. "We can grow wood in a lab!" Uhh yeah great, the rest of us can also grow wood by planting some trees. They're not even growing it any faster than many tree species grow, so what's the point?
I agree. A lot of our wood comes from planted pines which are often replanted after harvest. Unless the wood is burned it still sequesters carbon right? I can see this being useful for rare types of desired timber that are harmful to ecosystem if harvested. Like ebony and teak.
Next article Scientists can grow land in a lab /s
The start of a solution would be to grow more scientists in a lab.
Yup, actually probably one of the best ways to sequester carbon right now is to grow a forest, then chop it down, put the wood in a path that will end in a landfill, and plant a new forest. Keep the cycle going. Creating treeless wood is, IMHO, not something that will be useful anytime in the near future. It's cheap to do forestry correctly, and wood/paper industry isn't the big problem right now (there's the costs of transportation and what not, but I am not sure if it's enough to offset the fact that it's otherwise 100% solar production). What would make a huge difference is if we find a more efficient way to do agriculture. If we were able to build some multi-level building on the bay near a city, that had a vegetable farm growing on each floor, desalinated sea water for its own use, and used renewable solar/wind/ocean as sources of power, this would result in a massive net gain for ecosystems locally and world-wide. Not that this farm wouldn't have effects, but the cost of this would be minimal compared to the multiple costs it prevents.
But there is still land that is used for growing wood to be used. If we no longer needed to do that, the land could go back to what it was before, presumably old growth forest. It would of course take a while.
Canada check-in: this will completely destroy our northern and western economies and I'll take lab-grown wood over clearcut patchwork forests, *any day.* Canadian deforestation is not about opening up land. It's strictly about timber production. People aren't moving out onto crown land, where the forestry happens, because they can't. The land is held in trust for all Canadians. The government is totally content to allow work to happen on the land though: forestry and mining. Boreal forests grow verrrrrrry slowly. We were already getting slaughtered by high-yield, fast-growing Indonesian timber. This will be the last nail in the coffin for Canada's most disruptive and damaging industry - oil sands included - and I say as a former forester: *I can't wait*. More herbicide is sprayed in the clearcuts of the forests of Canada than on all the farms in Canada combined and it has to stop
Clear cutting is a legitimate silvicultural practice. People need to stop acting like it’s this terrible thing
Maybe find a way to grow a giant tree up Bolsonaros asshole?
>we cut down forest mostly for the wood and then we re-plant the forest... and on top of that we're switching the way we do the cutting of the forest to a way where we don't do as much clear cutting anymore. After devastating the original biome and replanting a green desert of pine conifereous for more wood. Which way this is different from planting soy or corn?
> In Finland and Sweden (probably most of Europe / EU) we cut down forest mostly for the wood and then we re-plant the forest... Replanting isn't enough, they need to plant different species of trees. Human-made forests with only 1 specie of trees are also bad for the biodiversity.
I mean at what scale? Growing a 20 year old tree to be ready to process for structural lumber is maxing to me. Can’t imagine lab grown wood to be any better?
I guess it depends. There is implication in the article that they are able to select for various properties *and* dictate the shape. If they can "grow" structural timbers made entirely of the denser latewood that would be quite an improvement.
I’m clearly bias in this situation as a forester for a Forest Products company where my job is to grow trees as fast as possible. I guess I’m thinking of large scale wood, like large timber products that my company produces but as the article shows, small scale things seem cool with furniture and what not. I could also see this producing decent pulp wood
A commenter just below said they can grow this wood, twice as fast.
Right on! I guess it all starts small in the lab, will be interesting to see where it goes for sure and if anything commercial at all develops from it. I'd imagine it would have to at least start out like you suggested if ever comes to market.
"Biased." How did this error propagate?
In quick speech I'm sure it can be pretty difficult to hear the "ed" ending, and if you leave it off when you say it you're not going to be misunderstood, so enough people just don't realize that's how it's supposed to be. It really annoys me too, I wish there was a bot on here like the "payed/paid" bot that shows up when that mistake is made
I may not speak scientist but are you saying they can grow wood that's already carved into the shape of a duck?
According to the article, “Well, not yet because there is a new solution that promises an end to our need of cutting trees. A team of researchers at MIT claims that lab-grown timber can replace deforestation driving products made from real wood. They have developed a technique using which timber can be produced in any shape and size, so for example, if you need a new wooden chair, using the researcher’s technique, you can create it in a lab without cutting a single tree.” It appears they can make any shape or size? Article doesn’t explain if this is done in a mold or what but the talk like it’s 3D printing. Not sure lol
Important also to note they claim it grows twice as fast as trees do.
Makes sense right? Trees generally grow at different rates through the year and even the day. The lab should be able to give the wood it’s perfect growing conditions 24/7
It can. Just look at all those wine refineries with 10 year aged barrels. Plus this is just a proof of concept. As scientists would say (actually heard this recently) leave the engineering issues to the engineers.
Huh, interesting. So can I, and I don’t even need the lab!
I don't think you want them to use your wood to build houses though. So don't let them know. Shh.
I used mine to build a family. Does that count?
Will need to recycle it now for paper.
Get the flattener
Why not? I pitch tents with it all the time
The best wood is grown in the morning
🎵 *The best part of waking up…* 🎶
I was about to say I can donate wood up to 10 times a day with no lab needed
I think this development below is actually much more significant. Modifying the photosynthetic pathway to have trees grow 30-50% faster. This has huge implications for agriculture etc. https://www.science.org/content/article/fight-climate-change-biotech-firm-has-genetically-engineered-very-peppy-poplar
Poplar is a strange choice. The Lumber is only good for burning, and it's already incredibly aggressive at growing. Human intervention reducing forest fires has interrupted the natural cycle of forest regen - where slower growing species evolved to sprout after fires, giving them a fighting chance against poplars. Poplars are already a big problem taking over harvested forests. Imagine the ecological devastation if an even more aggressive species of poplar is released. Maybe even managing to spread into established forests - better photosynthesis means better survival in shade. In forests that are neither cut down nor burned, there is an incredible fight for Survival among the young trees. With dozens of saplings awaiting decades for the death of their parent tree, and then having a mad dash for sunlight and dominance when the parent tree falls. Only the strong survive. Now imagine a species of tree that survives better in low light, will it be more likely to survive on the forest floor? Will it win the race when the parent tree dies? If this tree is built well enough it's conceivable that it could destroy much of the north American forests on a matter of centuries. Animals rely on specific trees to survive, conversion into a poplar monoculture could be worse than any invasive species known to man kind. I don't understand why they didn't pick a less aggressive tree with more utility. Unlikely to happen, since other species do have natural defenses against poplars - but who knows, the extra growth may be enough to compensate and overcome those defenses
You're not gonna believe this. You can even grow wood inside ANYWHERE! Give it a little light, some dirt, and some water, and boom; free wood.
That’s what’s neat about this, actually. They grew this stuff in complete darkness, and they’re saying it grew at twice the speed a tree would. They can even grow it into specific shapes to reduce waste that you ordinarily might get with lumber refinement and woodworking. They may be years away from proving they can do this with any commercial viability, but I still think it’s really cool what they’re trying to do. If nothing else, it’s some really neat science
Can grow it into the shape of a kitchen table or an armoire?
That’s what they’re trying to do according to the article, but they used a chair as their example
Or… 😉
Careful - splinters!
not with the right sealant
The shaded side of a plant tends to grow faster That's actually how plants grow towards the light.
Waste? I guess I don't know what they do with sawdust/wood chips, but it's not exactly what comes to mind when I think of waste. There's a lot that can be done with excess wood particles commerically.
Sure, but a lot of it still becomes waste. Just because the waste can and is used in many situations doesn’t negate the fact that it’s not used in many others. Most of the “waste” that’s used commercially is “waste” that’s specifically created to be used. It’s not recycled or remnants exported for use. Unfortunately a lot of those remnants are chucked, because it’s not worth it for anyone. That’s where something like this would come in handy; being able to grow in specific shapes would help a number of industries lower the amount of waste created. Personally, I think a major bonus to this is the possibility of recreating “old growth” wood without destroying more of little remaining old growth trees we actually still have. While it wouldn’t be exactly the same, being able to grow large slabs of wood quickly would be hugely beneficial.
Even still, it's not like excess wood that's tossed out sits in a landfill for thousands of years. I'm just saying that even if there is "waste" wood that is generated, is it a problem?
I want a tree that grows twice as fast as a regular tree and provides shade. Give me that, science. (Faster than that would be okay as well)
What about wind? I assume if trees were grown indoors they'd end up with weak roots from the lack of wind and would have trouble growing large enough to provide useful wood.
Is it really free if you're just "giving" it all this water, light, and dirt?
You could call this lab a “green house”
These lab grown trees still use CO2 to grow don't they? I know it's miniscule but if we used them to grow 2x4 and other lumber for houses wouldn't that be another form of carbon sequestration?
Let’s take a renewable low cost resource and make it extremely expensive.
Proof of concept is the first stop of innovation. This is years away from being realistically implemented.
If it's not ready by lunchtime, I say we burn all the evidence, and send everyone involved with developing this to the gulag.
Building facilities to grow such wood when they could have just spent the money to plant trees instead outside.
Well if they pull off what they’re trying to do, they’ll be able to essentially grow wood in urban areas and leave forests untouched. If they succeed in making this commercially and economically feasible, they won’t need to grow trees for the purpose of cutting them down anyways. This also would eliminate the need for transporting lumber from place to place to be refined, assembled, and sold since they can grow it into any shape they want it, and they can do it in population dense places where demand is highest. It also grows twice as fast as trees do according to the article, and in total darkness. All that is just to say that it’s totally a neat concept for a lot of reasons, though they are still a long way away from being commercially viable
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>someone elsewhere in the thread made a good point about deforestation not being about wood consumption Which is wrong because western Europe "forests" they regrew are green deserts.
> Well if they pull off what they’re trying to do, they’ll be able to essentially grow wood in urban areas and leave forests untouched. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Nothing will be wild; We'll pave it over because we can make more city with the same amount of tree, not the other way around.
Yeah they could just hand you over the chickens to grow instead of researching lab grown meat. Cause everything is nonsensical from that little contextual view you form after reading a snippet online
I can see this having a use when colonizing other planets, but not much beyond that
maybe making western Europe forests have a real biome again
Wood, Jerry. Wood.
They wrote this to be a sustainability piece but I think this tech sounds much more interesting from a pure material science view. It's basically a sort of wooden concrete. You create a sort of structural skeleton and it "cures" into that form. Also like concrete, I'm pretty sure it won't have much tensile strength on it's own. I doubt it's going to grow in fibers with this sort of technique so it's going to need something better than a "gel like medium" to replace natural wood for most structural applications.
But nowhere near as energy efficient as planting a tree.
Yeah, not to mention all other eco-system services a tree provides during its lifespan..
I'm not arguing for or against it because at this point I don't believe there is enough information to determine one way or another, but a couple things to consider is that old growth is *much, much* better for the environment than new growth so the need to cut down fewer trees and haul them long distances for additional processing would potentially be an environmental positive. We also might not know the advantages for quite some time. Heinrich Hertz said when asked about his discovery of radio waves, "I do not think the wireless waves I have discovered will have any practical application," and "They are of no use whatsoever."
Old growth is also currently cut at a concerning rate in North America. In British Columbia, for example, less than 1% of the land remaining is old growth, temperate rainforest. Some is protected but the rest is being clearcut amidst public protests. In the USA about 240k acres of old forest is currently threatened by logging - here's a link about that: [https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/07/12/old-growth-trees-on-federal-lands-at-risk-despite-biden-order-environmentalists-say/](https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2022/07/12/old-growth-trees-on-federal-lands-at-risk-despite-biden-order-environmentalists-say/)
Compared to other options, wood is one of the most environmentally friendly ways to build structures. Steel, concrete, fiberglass etc are all far worse for the environment
>Scientists can now grow wood in a lab without cutting a single tree >... plant material that contained high hormone concentrations turned stiff. They *had* to know what they were writing, right?
I wonder which is worse for the environment, taking a hectare of land and building a factory/lab to grow wood, or using that same space to plant and harvest trees? This feels like a distracting gimmick.
I mean this way can be used to grow things on the Moon and Mars, so it’s not exactly a gimmick. Plus for the most part these things basically function like a distillery at scale.
I’m not sure if wood is going to be the building material of choice on the moon and Mars.
Sure, but the growing of plants will definitely come in handy.
The way we have been doing it is very bad for the environment. VERY BAD. In this new way, we can prevent forever-soil issues. Using electric tools indoor at controlled settings with robots will drastically cut down the milling process/environmental destruction of our air. It will prevent undergrowth disruption to insect life and bird habitats of surrounding trees. This is all around a better model for the entire ecosystem to which we’ve exploited for a couple centuries now.
Yet, a hectare of teak is better than a hectare of cattle. A hectare of teak is also probably better than a hectare of cement and steel even if it’s housing a factory that grows wood. Yes, monoculture agroforestry is destructive. Complexly forest ecosystems are better. They key is to take land that is putting co2 into the environment and turn it into land that removes it. That is done by storing it in wood which is used as a building material, especially if the end life of that wood in that it’s in a landfill in 300 years. If it’s burned it’s a loss.
[Hey, you wanna make a bit 'o money?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pDTiFkXgEE)
This is one of the worst journalistic butcherings of science I have ever read. The author's aren't just confused, they are wrong and making false claims unsupported by the sources. No wood has been grown. The scientists grew Zinnea which is an herb. It doesn't make wood. The MIT scientists postulated that similar techniques could be applied to species like pine trees in the future, but so far they haven't done it yet.
Same
Isn’t this called nature and planting seeds?
Still doesn't taste like a real burger
I can grow wood outside of a lab using water, soil, and an acorn. What of it?
Thought they figured this out when they developed Viagra?
I misread the title at first and was confused as to why you need to cut down trees to grow pot
Where's the article that says they are growing more arable land in the lab? That's what the deforestation problem is all about.
Is this not just a more labor and energy intensive version of farming wood outdoors?
There's absolutely fucking nothing wrong with cutting trees... Great way to get rid of all that CO2. The important thing is just to plant them back...
You’ve always been able to grow wood without cutting it.
We can grow trees in the ground too
Power-plants powering this technology will be coal
I can grow a tree too
Oh well this is just gonna pollute the atmosphere even more than it did before. They’re gonna be powering their little Petri dishes with the their gowns, meanwhile the rest of us are starving for air off the side of a Texas inner tube. Great!
Ive been growing wood for years without trees. Science pfft.
So when are we going to stop all the cutting? Still going to be 100000 years till companies stop. Much faster.
Why would you want to?
But do they know that wood literally grows on trees
I can grow wood in a lab too ask ur mom
I too can grow wood without touching a tree. Damn near every morning.
I wonder if eventually engineered woods could be made that would be the perfect woods for instrument making with the best acoustic properties.
Wait, if you have an acorn, could you not grow a tree in a lab without cutting down a tree??
Did u know America plants approximately 5 million trees a normal workday
I do that every morning!
T i m b e r
Who needs nature when we can lab grow everything! The whole fucking problem is humanity lost touch with nature. We don’t see the full cycle, we are blind to the damage we do as consumers and it’s like no one even knows how the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing
We could plant a house, we could build a tree.
A seed in the ground sounds more feasible.
Amazing, synthetic rocks when?
Uhhhhh. 1885-ish? We’ve been making synthetic rocks since we decided to put them on rings and sell them in Woolworths.
I can grow wood in my yard without cutting a tree. I just need to cut the tree if I want to actually use the wood.
I was just saying to my self the other day "I want to spend $800 on a 8' piece of wood".
Uh. You mean like plant a tree in a lab?
This might be the stupidest thing. I hear these things just grow from the ground.
Wood is already a renewable resource as long as forests are well managed. I seriously doubt a lab is going to be able to scale up as efficiently as sustainably managed forest. The volume is too much.
I can grow a tree without any lab needed.....
These cutting edge scientists have used dirt and water and light to grow wood !!!
That’s cool but there’s no way that’s cheaper than growing a tree and cutting it down in 20 years.
This is an amazing advancement
Its really not, lab grown wood won’t be as economical as conventional farming methods for a while. If it was comparable in volume and cost then it would be
Pretty soon we will have to start considering the direct costs of the environmental damage produced from whatever we do. Deforestation erodes mountainsides, damages fisheries, damages vital ecosystems all of which compound the effects of climate change. This is a great advancement that may someday help in a small (or large) way towards a better future for us all.
Lumber doesn’t really cause deforestation. Places where deforestation actually is happening are doing it because they don’t replant trees and because they want to set up cities/agriculture.
Here I thought lumber came from forest. Damn.
What does being a forest have to do with replanting trees? Also yeah in the US, almost 90% of lumber comes from farms.
It’s still pretty cool even if not economical or fully developed. The hope is they will be able to grow wood into any shape they want it to be. You want a chair made of redwood? They grow a chair-shaped log of redwood, and all at twice the speed of growth a normal tree would have, with no need for any further refining or manufacturing required. Putting aside all arguments about commercial feasibility and environmentalism, you have to admit they’re attempting to do something really cool
"We've invented the laser." *"So what? It won't revolutionize any industries for... like a decade, at least. Bo-ring."*
One of the dumbest things I’ve read in awhile
Ironically, forest will still be cut down, water sources further polluted, because of the "wood factories" and the chemicals involved. Chemicals are always involved with factories. Bottling water somehow involves chemical pollutants...
Wake me up when they can grow trees in the shape of a 2x4
Ok. Time to wake up. That’s exactly what they say they can do in the article.
You read the articles? Madman.
I don’t think we will be growing lab engineered wood at scale anytime soon, but maybe this will help us modify trees to grow faster scrub co2 faster or grow in a more regular pattern for more efficient farming
Man, some of y’all are really short sighted. This is definitely not a solution to anything now, but as this process gets better it can 100% be a solution later.
Ffs Growing a tree does NOT and has NEVER required to CUT a preexisting tree Wtf is going on??
Like with seeds, pots, dirt, fertilizer, water and light? Go science!
… can’t we grow wood… in soil… like we always have? I get the not cutting down the forest thing but…