In seriousness, nominal vs actual sizing is just terrible. Do places outside of North America do this too?
Maybe you need to get out more? In France new public buildings are mandated to be at least 50% wood or other bio-based renewables. Also ~5% (and increasing) of new domestic builds are timber framed.
(Concrete isn't, but plain old stone? Or bricks?)
Yes, of course, stone doesn’t really grow back on the timescales that we care about. Yes, stone not “bio” in any sense really.
But the goal of the law is not to make biology or geology points. It is to reduce the embodied carbon of new construction. I guess the determination was made that stone has some carbon cost… maybe it comes from the mining?
Or maybe they are trying to kickstart, specifically, a new industry in the field of growable construction material. Maybe they figure stone mining is already well developed tech anyway.
Lots of house in France are made of that. Not “rocks” and that is a co2 intensive process to produce concrete.
See : Lafarge
Likewise, there's nothing renewable about stone. Our primary source is digging it out of the ground.
That isn't renewable in the timeframe of humanity, but in the age of the universe it's renewable.
You can recycle them. And raw stones are not a rare thing and they do get formed new constantly inside the earth.
I wouldn't call that marginal. And vulcanoes are just the visible part of that process happening everywhere in the crust.
Some rate of formation is not enough to satisfy the commonly held definition of renewable resources. Google "is stone a renewable resource" for a jumping off point.
Sure, it doesn't fit the definition, but there is also no reason to care that it doesn't.
We have concrete buildings going back to Greek and Roman times, mostly standing.
Wooden buildings have a very finite lifespan, and, aside from earthquakes, much less so in a disaster. A wooden city and a steel/brick/concrete city react very differently to firebombing.
Especially with declining populations, it makes sense to build structures to last. The old school brick/concrete/stone/... European buildings from 1500 are largely in good shape, at least where they weren't demolished by war.
Traditional European construction is also much more friendly for heating / cooling. The thermal capacity of stone-based materials helps a lot.
To me, it feels a bit like Germany banning nuclear power plants, and switching to Russian fossil fuels instead...
That is woke bs and you know it. If it ain't 100% roman concrete, it ain't right.
It will be relatively similar to most other major European cities; solid masonry construction has historically been the norm.
You'll find some wooden houses in smaller towns and rural areas, but even there, if you head over to e.g. Poland, most things will be solid masonry. And the wooden construction is mostly relatively new; what you'll rarely find is old wooden construction.
In Sweden, around 80% of standing homes are wooden. 90% of new single-family homes use wood. Gothenburg is the exception, not the rule, thanks to 19th-century zoning laws that limited wooden buildings to two storeys.
The Netherlands is Western Europe, not Northern or Central - basic geography.
Wood dominates residential construction in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. Denmark is about 50/50. Poland uses more masonry today but has a strong wooden tradition in the south.
You're making sweeping claims about places you clearly haven't spent any real time in. Maybe do some proper research before pretending to be an expert.
What is "very finite" here? Where I grew up there are wood houses/barns/structures made entirely out of wood and still standing/being used after hundreds of years. Is that not enough?
So the 5% French figures in 2025 confirm my impression. Most stuff are not made of wood in France.
Maybe it’s a language thing : when I say « made of wood » I mean that no stone are involved. There is no percentage. The whole frame is 2 by 4 from Home Depot.
The facade of a house or structure is usually tied into the framing so it doesn't fall over. Hence, brick ties are used to secure it to the wood or steel framing.
https://www.inchcalculator.com/actual-size-of-dimensional-lu...
That's just an old wives tale.
Lumber shrinks for money reasons, older lumber is bigger [1] with sequential revisions to the standard decreasing it's real size [2] [3] (the difference between 2in and 15/8in in strength is minimal however you can keep doing that math, and they did, to go down from 2in to 1.5in over a century).
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/vv9atu/t...
[2]: https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDeta...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaJFudED5FQ
They claim that the change was driven by railroad shipping charges, and wasn't based on drying, but on pre-planing the rough lumber to reduce shipping cost. They further claim that in 1919 the US Dept. of Agriculture studied the issue and ended up defining a national standard for what the post-planed dimensions of a 2x4 should be. And they further claim that it took until the early 1960s to settle on a new standard that matches what we use today.
The pre-planing is a common claim, but I don't believe it. They can make lumber whatever size they want - of course they need to plane it, but they just make it larger to account for that. Still the planing excuse it one they like to use because it doesn't show "them" as trying to cheat us.
I understand the origins of this. But I've never understood why we haven't moved on to actual sizing given the scale at which standardized lumber dimensions are produced
This process will need to regenerate almost all of that sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, or it's just peracetic paper again.
I'm not sure if it's been measured, but I imagine this densified wood would probably have at least twice the thermal conductivity of typical construction lumber, since naturally dense hardwoods already approach that.
So it seems like we'd basically need to replace 2x studs with 1x studs, assuming the same stud spacing, in order to match the thermal performance of a traditional wall.
I don't think this would be a dealbreaker at all though, one could always use continuous insulation instead of cavity insulation, which has a lot of benefits anyway. Maybe it can end up being a competitor to metal studs for commercial builds, at least.
I believe that's somewhat true of woods as well - different woods seem to range from 0.12-0.25 W/(mK) or so, which is somewhat less conductive than the underlying compounds like cellulose (0.4), thanks to the trapped air in wood.
It seems like densifying wood would mitigate the insulation contribution of trapped air, causing thermal conductivity to approache that of the underlying compounds like cellulose, though I'm not sure exactly what those compounds are with their process and how close they get to that air-free extreme.
its very unlikely that this change will be an important consideration for house building or shopping though. theres simpler spots to reduce heat loss, like double paning your windows
I wonder how it impacts the effects of humidity and time to make wood warp.
The loss of r value can be off set with two 2x4 frames. As strong as a 2x6 wall and about the same price. Added benefit is air gaps.
I have high hopes for this product as a leg of sustainability.
You're right insofar as lots of improvements have been made to steel-and-concrete building fire safety since the 1970s. Plastics are sometimes still a problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire
https://nfsa.org/2023/08/22/understanding-combustible-materi...
Now, Ipe is very expensive. I would hope this is less expensive than Ipe, and then the trick is to make your starting materials much larger, and being able to account for the shrinkage once the densification process has been completed.
You could also do laminates of this densified wood, in order to be able to use it for beams, plywood type functions, etc…. Or even fire resistant 2x4 boards.
Here's a NileRed video replicating the process.
"First, natural wood blocks were immersed in a boiling aqueous solution of mixed 2.5 M NaOH and 0.4 M Na2SO3 for 7 h, followed by immersion in boiling deionized water several times to remove the chemicals. Next, the wood blocks were pressed at 100 °C under a pressure of about 5 MPa for about 1 day to obtain the densified wood"
Pretty simple and straightforward.