[1]https://corporate.arcelormittal.com/sustainability/climate-a...
Steel doesn't pull carbon out of the air, unfortunately.
The raw materials to manufacture it are mostly hydrocarbons. Maybe we should be focusing on making "green epoxy" instead.
I think growing trees is better than just capturing CO2 directly as growing a large forest might have other advantages and a lot of wood can be used for normal human industry as well.
It's not an insurmountable level of effort per person, but if you try to do it on a large scale you inevitably end up with logistical problems, and it would require quite a lot of space.
Edit: strike that I see what you meant there with the a day. I just should have actually read what you wrote before I commented.
Also, they can't even get people to wear a mask or take a shot. Getting all these people to plant trees seems like an insurmountable task.
Actually 20 million trees every 2 days doesn’t sound that ridiculous. Especially as we build more green infrastructure and reduce the daily emissions.
https://www.greenandgrowing.org/how-many-trees-are-planted-e...
If we had an actual price on carbon seaweed production would be a boom industry.
EDIT: After some research I found an interesting article addressing this: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/19/1035889/kelp-car...
No need to drop it to the bottom of the ocean though. Just build something out of it.
"At comparable ages and spans, smaller percentages of prestressed concrete bridges are classified "structurally deficient" than steel or timber bridges."[1]
https://www.rcinet.ca/en/2019/02/26/u-s-use-of-toilet-paper-...
Wood is biodegradable, renewable, and recyclable. It can be grown and harvested sustainably; I know because I used to work with a guy who made a living off surveying forestry for sustainable timber harvesting.
It causes no environmental issues if left to rot, doesn't have to be disposed of in a particular way.
The vast majority (well over 90%) of plastic is not recycled.
Plastic never goes away. Plastic just breaks down into microparticles that are now so pervasive there's basically no part of the planet that doesn't have microplastics, no animal that doesn't have them in its digestive system. And all the while, it's leeching out toxic chemicals.
The thing is, once we start looking at wood in detail, it's never just wood. It's wood, plus adhesives, paints, and finish. You can't use just wood because it rots - you at least need to add some pigment to block UV rays and drainage to limit water pooling. Each of those additives are a potential source of VOCs(volatile organic compounds, the term that more accurately describes "chemicals"). And each step taken during processing adds energy cost. Paper and corrugated cardboard are not innocuous - they use one of the higher-energy processes relative to the amount of input material.
When you look at what you can do besides wood, you get similar tradeoffs. Stone is great, but it's still hard to work with directly, hard enough to not scale to our industrial population - as it stands, you need an artisianal economy of stonemasons to make those huge ancient constructions. Concrete has a huge climate footprint and the dust is a major VOC source. Steel is high-energy and not abundant enough to be used everywhere.
Thus, plastics enter as a way of getting some of the qualities we want. Plastics are not all one of a kind and have varying VOC content. We can't afford not to use them to have this population and quality of life, which means we have to study how to use them safely. The microplastic issue is a part of that, but it's oversold as "plastic is scary". Wood smoke is also scary, as anyone who has been around a wildfire will attest.
Also petroleum being a big factor in CO2 levels it's hard to not put it first isn't it ?
Somehow there is a synergy here we haven’t quite accessed.
Burn petroleum => release CO2 => tree grows, sequesters CO2 => use tree for something that doesn’t burn it or compost it …
I feel like we are on the edge of figuring this out.
Aluminum has been growing into that role of "steel alternative", but there's still room for other alternatives.
There is a new Titanium process, not as cheap as I would like, but a lot better than we have now. https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-021-00166-8
Supposedly Napoleon III had aluminum tableware for his most honored guests, and gold for everyone else.
Magnesium is also better at casting components with thinner walls and tighter tolerances than aluminum. However, even with the many advantages of magnesium, aluminum remains a less expensive alternative for die casting.
[0]: https://diecasting.com/blog/the-difference-between-aluminum-...
Secondly Aluminium is normally alloyed with other metals bringing the two even closer.
Finally it's a light, strong metal and used in many similar industrial products as Aluminium.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-14/aluminum-...
I've been using a lot of MDF lately, and it's interesting to think that it's just sawdust and glue. It makes me wonder: are there other fibers which could be used in a similar process which would yield better materials than MDF?
It must use wood compression at very high pressures, which collapses the cell walls in the wood and results in a densified high-strength wood.
There have been various methods to make densified wood for structural applications, but I assume that this is an improved process, which makes an even denser and more homogeneous material, which ensures that even blades can be made from it.
Edit: According to Phys.org, the improvement over the previous processes is a treatment in a chemical bath that removes the lignin and other components of the wood, leaving only the cellulose, before the compression.
This removal of the non-cellulose components ensures that the densified wood is harder and with less defects than those made with the older processes.
Yeah, maybe. But you're right, when it comes to metals, steel's vastly most substantial component, iron is about the most abundant metallic element in the universe, so it ain't gonna disappear from our manufacturing materials list anytime soon.
Iron and steels have their obvious problems - rust for instance, bad performance high high temperatures is another and it'd be nice if iron had properties more like say titanium but that's wishful thinking.
Taming iron to behave the way we want it to has always been and still is a major problem. For example, stainless steel is expensive and it's always been a bit of a kludge (the need for hundreds of different varieties of alloys attest to that; same goes for hardness, for instance, the many tool-steel-like alloys that are needed by industry).
If anything, we need considerably more material science research to make iron alloys much better than they are now and thus make them appear very sexy to everyone's eyes.
Forests have a lot of decaying and decomposing deadfall wood but still seem to be a carbon sink so it may be a layering thing...
If all you want is to add organics, you'd probably fork in manure.
Meanwhile they liberate oxygen, which I enjoy daily.
What I like about this idea is it's a way to take carbon out of the air while manufacturing something. We are going to have to deal with carbon no matter what, why not manufacture things with it?
Good reads, if this area interests you, are Fernand Braudel Civilization and Capitalism Vol 1: The Structures of Everyday Life and Vaclav Smil Energy and Civilization: A History.
Wood chip heating already has that problem
Not at the scale at which the world needs steel.
It's not that we can't design buildings to last longer, it's that you don't want to design a building to last two centuries when you know it's probably going to be torn down in 50 years no matter what shape it's in.
If a building is made harder to demolish than its neighbours it's got a better chance to survive. I plan plutonium-core concrete walls for my mausoleum to prevent future generations from interfering with it.
This is priceless. love it.
Also I'm doubting "minimal processing" for steel. You have to dig up the ore with giant machines, transport huge amounts of it by train, smash it with a lot of energy and heavy equipment, melt it with a lot of energy and heavy equipment, etc., etc. This seems like the opposite of minimal?
Steel is perfectly recyclable, but even then there is plenty of iron on earth. We won't be running out of iron.
Edit: Of course, steel is just a name of class of alloys - some of the steel types have a rarer elements like Mo, Ti, V...
Plus, steel is entirely recyclable. And it has some natural properties that make is relatively easy to recycle. It can be sorted with magnets, and it has a higher melting point than most impurities.
This way you get to reuse all the (enormous) existing infrastructure, as well.
We live on a thin crusty shell around a ball of iron.
Nevertheless, the mantle is made of a mixture of iron oxides, silicon dioxide and magnesium oxide, with small quantities of the other elements, so under the thin crust, even if there remain thousands of kilometers until the iron ball, there is nonetheless what is essentially a huge amount of iron ore.
... which is way beyond our reach.
On earth it replenishes too via meteorite strikes and by nuclear decay. I'm not sure was decays into iron, but I'm sure it's most things, given its name as the most stable element
Mind you, rust is quite similar to iron ore