The carbon cycle and forest management
As everyone knows, the Earth’s atmosphere contains an unsustainable amount of carbon that produces the greenhouse effect with the devastating consequences we know: melting of the poles, desertification of large areas of the planet, and the succession of extreme weather events. All these are the consequences of excessive CO2 input into the atmosphere resulting from human activity.
Through their growth, plants absorb carbon in the atmosphere, helping to restore the balance in the carbon cycle now altered by human activity. Plants have done this in the past as well. In ancient geological eras they made our planet habitable by absorbing the carbon emitted by volcanoes that made the earth an inhospitable planet.
Now plants and trees in particular have the essential task of absorbing the excess carbon put in by humans through the burning of fossil fuels.
In ancient times, fossil fuels were also plants. Oil consists of the liquefaction of plant matter stored in the bowels of the earth as a result of movements of the earth’s crust. From a certain point of view, it would be better for oil to remain buried in the bowels of the earth. However, at present it is too convenient to use it for mobility, industrial production and residential heating even though everyone-or many-are trying to put a limit on this excessive use. Undoubtedly, the effort to plant trees is crucial to absorb carbon in the atmosphere and restore the balance. Some countries are making great efforts. For example, Scotland has planned to plant 22.5 million trees each year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqEYS23TsQE
Ireland is also very active in this regard having embraced an ambitious plan to plant 440 million trees by 2030
https://www.lifegate.com/people/news/ireland-440-million-trees
These efforts are commendable and should be combined with the effort to reduce carbon inputs to the atmosphere by changing technologies and habits. The goal is to rebalance the carbon cycle between what is input and what is absorbed by the system.
The role of wooden constructions
Building wooden houses, making X Lam panels, and using wooden beams for floors are all ways of sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and fixing it in the structures of our homes at least for the lifetime of our houses and buildings. Construction wood is derived from the cutting of a mature plant. Following the cutting of a mature plant is followed by the planting of 2 or 3 new plants resulting in the renewal of the forest stand. As it is explained in this recent BBC article young plants are much more active than mature plants in capturing carbon in the atmosphere therefore the cutting and planting cycle is a very useful cycle in combating excess carbon in the air.
The X Lam and unused forests
L’X Lam was invented in Austria with the aim of promoting the use of wood in construction but also to utilize a stock of unused forests initially planted for paper and chipboard production. Cutting down these forests and rejuvenating them benefits the environment. Mature forests stop absorbing carbon. Young trees are the main players in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.
Tree cutting and planting is essential for carbon absorption
Planting two trees for every one cut
The principle of sustainability is to plant two or three trees for every tree cut. Improperly managed mature spruce forests cease to optimize their environmental utility, as it is the young trees that have the greatest capacity to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere.
Due to their intense and vigorous development, young trees are a real boon to the Earth’s atmosphere.
The maturity of a spruce forest occurs after 80 years. After that time, tree replacement ensures that new young, carbon voracious plants implement the air cleaning we desire.
So where to put the mature wood?
Paper consumption has been greatly reduced with the advent of information technology, so many of Europe’s forests remain unused and require renewal. Aging forests also make them acidic and unfruitful. Excessive pine needles and dry branches turn to carbon with their maceration and worsen the positive balance of carbon absorbed and re-injected.
The most ecological and functional solution is to use lumber to build wooden houses
The wooden house captures carbon that would otherwise be dumped into the atmosphere. Even left to rot, wood contributes to the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. In the very long term, wood will turn into oil or coal as it did in past eras. Now, however, with the overuse of fossil fuel, the carbon cycle has broken down and the balance between input and absorption must be restored with everyone’s help.
Cutting, replanting use wood in construction
In every developed country from Italy to England to the United States and now in France and other nations, wood is replacing concrete. Even now, enough concrete is poured each year to cover a nation like Great Britain.Concrete contributes 4 percent of carbon emissions to the atmosphere. Wood constructions due to their weight (about 20 percent of traditional constructions) require much less concrete even in foundations thus allow them to be built with reduced carbon emission during concrete production and store carbon in the structure.
Wood in Japan
Sixty years ago in Japan, the Americans planted with the Marshall Plan so many fir trees. Those plants that are now about sixty years old are ripe to be rejuvenated and used for wood construction. In fact, even in Japan the use of wood and particularly X Lam in construction is becoming more and more widespread. Japan in fact like Italy is also a country subject to seismic risk and in wood the Japanese have identified a tool to combat this risk common to us. It is very famous in fact a video on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=T08KRyVhyeo produced by an Italian-Japanese company that exemplifies the resistance of a five-story building subjected to the accelerations equal to those of the Kobe earthquake https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terremoto_di_Kobe_del_1995 which destroyed 500,000 homes.
Conclusion
An advertisement from the 1970s said ‘use plastic to save trees’ today we know that proper use of wood helps develop valuable extensive reforestation projects that will enable us to greatly reduce carbon in the atmosphere. We also know that just planting trees is not enough, we also need to drastically reduce emissions. That’s why the new houses we build combine the two together: thanks to the wooden structure they fix carbon in space and, thanks to high insulation and the use of heat pumps, they guarantee zero emissions.