Carbon emissions from the EU's power sector fell by 12 per cent in 2019, thanks mostly to the retirement of coal plants.The unveiling of the Tesla Cybertruck in November and an ad for a battery-charged Hummer during Sunday's Super Bowl suggest that electric vehicles are moving beyond their unassuming, urban-friendly image to "eco-beasts." This may be a way to convince skeptical Americans between the coasts to consider buying an EV - or at least that's what this New York Times column argues.(CNBC) Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web Email us at Old issues of What on Earth? are right here.
"Everybody's doing it for the first time," Acton said. For example, Brock Commons in Vancouver cost about seven per cent more than a similar building of steel and concrete. When it's revised later this year, the federal building code will also allow that height.Īcross Canada, there are plans to build more wood highrises, from 12-storey condo projects in Victoria and Esquimalt on Vancouver Island to 30-storey wood towers in Toronto proposed by Google as part of its Sidewalk Labs development.Īcton's firm is working on the Arbour, a 10-storey building slated for George Brown College in downtown Toronto (see photo above).ĭespite the budding interest, Acton warns that builders haven't yet worked out the "most economical" configurations for towers made of wood. Since then, some provinces - most recently Alberta - have changed their building codes to allow highrises of up to 12 storeys. Until now.Īcton and his team got a special exemption to build Brock Commons Tallwood House, an 18-storey student residence at the University of British Columbia and the tallest wood building in the world when it opened in 2017. There was also another barrier: the maximum height for most wood buildings allowed by building codes in Canada was six storeys. "It was kind of like, now that we have engineered wood and we have an environmental interest, why not explore mass timber to get it back in use?" Acton said. "It's an engineered wood product for building on the scale of cement and steel," Koven said.ĭesigners, engineers and architects, including Russell Acton of Acton Ostry Architects in Vancouver, saw that and similar new products as an opportunity. One problem is that the most common wood product used in modern construction until now - the two-by-four - doesn't have the strength or versatility needed for constructing tall buildings, said Anne Koven, director of the Mass Timber Institute, which is based at the University of Toronto.īut in the 1990s, researchers in Austria and Germany invented cross-laminated timber (CLT), which uses adhesives to bind smaller pieces of wood into sturdy, fire-resistant panels and beams. Not only that, but building with timber would cut emissions from steel and cement manufacturing by half. And if 50 per cent of buildings were built with wood, they could store up to 700 million tonnes of carbon a year, the researchers estimate. But if we pushed that up to 10 per cent, those buildings could store 10 million tonnes of carbon per year. Right now, just 0.5 per cent of new buildings are constructed with timber.
The latter is the second-largest industrial emitter in the world, after the fossil fuel industry, generating seven per cent of global emissions.Ī five-storey residential building built with wood can store up to 180 kilograms of carbon per square metre - three times more than a high-density forest with the same footprint, according to a new study from U.S.
It would reduce emissions linked to steel and cement production. The wood stores carbon for the lifetime of the building, which (temporarily) prevents it from entering the atmosphere. Proponents say that could have two benefits: But what if we built highrises out of wood instead? Tall towers have defined cities as "jungles" of concrete and glass.
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