{"id":145759,"date":"2022-09-06T13:24:13","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T18:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/building-future-cities-out-of-timber-could-save-100-billion-tons-of-co2-emissions"},"modified":"2022-09-06T13:24:13","modified_gmt":"2022-09-06T18:24:13","slug":"building-future-cities-out-of-timber-could-save-100-billion-tons-of-co2-emissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/building-future-cities-out-of-timber-could-save-100-billion-tons-of-co2-emissions","title":{"rendered":"Building Future Cities Out of Timber Could Save 100 Billion Tons of CO2 Emissions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/building-future-cities-out-of-timber-could-save-100-billion-tons-of-co2-emissions2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Housing the world\u2019s rapidly-growing population will require massive urban expansion and lots of concrete and steel, but these materials have a huge carbon footprint. A shift to <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2022\/04\/27\/could-future-skycrapers-be-made-of-wood-two-new-timber-towers-are-going-up\/\">building cities out of wood<\/a> could avoid more than 100 billion tons of CO2 emissions, according to a new study.<\/p>\n<p>Replacing reinforced concrete with timber might sound unwise, but innovations in engineered wood mean it\u2019s now feasible to construct multi-story buildings without traditional materials. So-called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.vox.com\/energy-and-environment\/2020\/1\/15\/21058051\/climate-change-building-materials-mass-timber-cross-laminated-clt\">\u201cmass timber\u201d<\/a> is increasingly being used for structural and load-bearing elements in mid-rise developments, which refers to buildings between 4 and 12 stories high.<\/p>\n<p>One of the main selling points of mass timber is that it\u2019s much less carbon-intensive than steel and cement. In theory it\u2019s actually carbon negative, because <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2022\/04\/14\/a-startup-is-engineering-trees-to-grow-faster-and-capture-more-carbon\/\">trees absorb CO2<\/a> in the process of producing wood. But question marks have remained over exactly how much more climate-friendly wood-based construction is, and what impact demand for timber could have on the environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Housing the world\u2019s rapidly-growing population will require massive urban expansion and lots of concrete and steel, but these materials have a huge carbon footprint. A shift to building cities out of wood could avoid more than 100 billion tons of CO2 emissions, according to a new study. Replacing reinforced concrete with timber might sound unwise, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":556,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[493,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climatology","category-sustainability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/556"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145759\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}