[vlmutolo]

A company called Invent Wood (based on research out of UMD) is creating “densified” wood that solves a lot of these problems. They have a process that collapses the cell walls in wood and compresses it to a quarter of its thickness, which gives something like a 10x increase in tensile strength, making it stronger than (a certain type of commonly used) steel by volume and weight. It’s also significantly harder than wood (nearly as hard as the carbon steel people use for knives), doesn’t warp, and is resilient to impacts.

My intuition is that trees need wood to serve purposes greater than just structural integrity. It needs to transport water and nutrients. But for building, we don’t care about these channels and it’s better if we collapse them to encourage stronger hydrogen bonding between cellulose chains.

It sounds like a lot of the benefits of “old growth” wood can be manufactured now. This is probably a good thing for preserving nature; there’s a greater demand for wood with these properties than a supply of old trees. Better to leave the great old trees intact and do cool engineering on cheap trees that grow quickly.

Recent Hacker News discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44020832

[IAmBroom]

> It sounds like a lot of the benefits of “old growth” wood can be manufactured now.

Yes, at greatly increased costs, both economic and ecological.

Fast-growth timber farms may produce an inferior product, but we've already compensated for that in design. 112% of a material that provides 90% of the "goodness" is a viable path; so is buying a Ford* every 5 years instead of a Mercedes every 10*. (Ford haters: :%s/Ford/Chevy) (* MB haters: shaddup, it's just an analogy.)

Until the overhead is lower than growing yellow pine, this is a niche product.