Where does construction lumber come from?

johnrem

don't worry..they plant more trees.

concretemasonry

Get enough trees and they will be cut up and used to make ethanol and the price of wood will go sky high!

China already frowns on using things grown for construction since there are better things to do with the valuable land. - they would rather grow food and use aggregate from river deposits or vertical quarries to build permanent buildings. They do buy our oil and import a small amount of wood from us.

bofusmosby

Trees produce oxygen. A mature leafy tree produces as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year.

Maintenance 6

Framing lumber is mostly softwood and mainly comes from the nortwestern U.S. and Canada with some production in the northeastern U.S. Softwoods come from evergreen trees (except for southern yellow pine which is sometimes considered a hardwood). The number of usable board feet varies with the size of the harvested tree and sawing technique. Modern mills with laser guides get more lumber from a butt log than little mom and pop saw mills. Southern yellow pine, which is used for most treated lumber production is harvested in the southeastern U.S. Hardwoods are harvested in most states, but major production is from the appalachian mountain regions from N.Y. to Georgia. For those of you who want to replenish the worlds oxygen supply, the estimate is that hardwood growth has outpaced harvesting for the past 50 years.

trptman

no no no, you guys have it all wrong.
2x4's come from the wood fairy and we'll only run out if she decides we will.

trptman

Al Gore better hope we don't run out of wood for 2x4's, cause if we do we're coming after him. I bet we can get a few 2x4's out of his limbs.

ehoez

avg tree gives 2x100linar feet of lumber

Nestor_Kelebay

It's the sugar molecule that ties us all together, all us living things, from plants to fungii to animals like us.

Water from the roots combine with light from the Sun and CO2 from the air in the leaves to produce C6H12O6, or sugar molecules. Those sugar molecules are stacked up like bricks to make every structure in the tree. A tree's wood is about 75% cellulose with the other 25 percent being something called "hemi cellulose" and "Lignin" which is the glue that holds wood cells together in wood.

The sugar molecule isn't straight. It's actually a pentagon formed by carbon atoms. It's the location of that 6th carbon atom that determines whether you have alpha sugar or beta sugar. If you stack up alpha sugar molecules like bricks, you make cellulose. If you stack up beta sugar molecules like bricks, you make starch. Both can be broken down into sugar moelcules again by the right kinds of organisms. For example, when wood rots, the wood rot fungus (called "Serpula Lacrymans") is merely recyling that wood to use the sugar for it's own metabolic processes. Similarily, goats and cattle can eat cellulose and break it down into sugar to fuel their bodies just like we can eat starch (corn, bread, rice) to fuel our bodies.

It's when we learn to convert cellulose and plant waste into sugar moelcules that our energy crisis will be over. Until now, we've only been able to convert starch into sugar with enzymes and then ferment that sugar into alcohol (corn to ethanol). When we learn to convert cellulose into sugar like the wood rot fungus does, then scrap wood from building demolition, old tee shirts (cotton is nearly 100% cellulose), autumn leaves and grass clippings, books, newspapers and magazines, your old furniture and all the sawdust from the lumber mills will be the feedstock for our new fuel factories. We will be recycling virtually every plant byproduct into fuel. And, since we won't be adding any new carbon atoms to the atmosphere by burning that ethanol, it'll be environmentally friendly.

The next Exxon will have fuel factories mounted on a fleet of about a dozen semitrailers that do various agricultural circuits, collecting tobacco plants off the ground after harvest in Virginia, cotton plants in Alabama and Mississippi and then going down to Florida to collect the waste from the citrus harvest, and converting all that plant waste into alcohol in the field and delivering it to company owned gas stations along the route.

And that new technology, just like most new technologies, is going to create lots of new spin off industries and jobs. We're making everything from plastic grocery bags to asphalt now from a steady supply of crude oil. We'll be making other things from a steady supply of starch, cellulose and ethyl alcohol. The more things change, the more they stay the same.