The Story of Stuff

This video is from 2009, so some of the details are admittedly a little dated, but the overall concepts - that we need to reduce our usage of materials in spite of the business community's desire for us to increase our usage and many governments' business-friendly leanings - are as relevant today as they were fifteen years ago (as I type this, anyway).

The channel has continued to make videos, posting their most recent (as of me typing this on July 4th, 2024) one in June of 2024, and they have a website with information on how to get involved in their campaign to decrease materials usage - particularly plastics and materials that end up in landfills.

How The World Of Building Materials Is Responding To Climate Change

Source - https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/15/21058051/climate-change-building-materials-mass-timber-cross-laminated-clt 

I will readily admit that I can't stand Science Friday.

I'm an NPR guy all the way, and I'm a science geek. Science Friday should be right up my alley. It's like they've made a show just to hook me in. (It's like Newton's Apple - which I loved as a kid - for the radio.)

And then Ira Flatow comes on and asks inane questions like, "what's your favorite cephalopod?" or "what does alligator poop smell like?" of serious scientists trying to discuss their research. If it weren't for Ira, I might really love Science Friday.

Occasionally, though, the topic is interesting enough that I fight through my Ira-loathing and stay tuned to WVXU (my local NPR station, I'm a sustaining member, doncha know).

In late February, for example, there was a segment (thirty-three minutes long) about mass timber buildings (buildings with wooden structural members) titled How the World of Building Materials is Responding to Climate Change.

Increasing concerns with steel and concrete construction - both release huge amounts of carbon dioxide during the material's initial production - are leading people back toward building with wood - or some form of engineered wood-based products (laminates, particle composites, etc) as a way to avoid the carbon dioxide release from concrete and steel production.

Not that the concrete industry isn't fighting back.

Sustainability: definition with simple natural science

I don't know why you'd need a fancy, French guy telling you what sustainable development is. It's development that can be sustained.

See, simple as can be.

Actually, the definition that Alex (sp?) gives - sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs - works really well. He does go on a bit to explain this in more scientific (thermodynamics, law of conservation of matter, photosynthesis) terms and to explore a few of the root causes of unsustainability.

The four causes of unsustainability...

• Relatively large flows of materials from the Earth's crust (mining, drilling)
• Accumulation of substances created by society (CO₂, polymers, trash)
• Physically inhibit nature's ability to run cycles (deforestation, paving over grass)
• Barriers to people meeting their basic needs worldwide (economic inequality)

The above video is posted on the Sustainability Illustrated website alongside a BUNCH of other videos. It's only an introduction to the topic, and his other videos go into much more detail on the topic.

The Chemarts Cookbook

From the ChemArts webpage, "[t]he CHEMARTS Cookbook offers both simple and more advanced ideas and recipes for hands-on experiments with wood-based materials. The book showcases interesting results, focusing on raw materials that are processed either chemically or mechanically from trees or other plants: cellulose fibres, micro- or nano-structured fibrils, cellulose derivatives, lignin, bark, and wood extractives."

ChemArts is a program at Aalto University in Finland pairing chemical engineering and art and design students to explore innovative uses for Finnish plant life (their words, from the video just below).



The program has published a 'cookbook' of sorts in which they provide recipes for 'cellulosic material exploration'. In other words, they have a bunch of recipes using cellulose derivatives from minimally processed materials like wood pulp to more processed ingredients like nanofibrillar cellulose, carboxymethyl cellulose, and microcrystalline cellulose along with fairly non-toxic materials like baking soda, calcium carbonate, glycerol, and starch.

The 'cookbook' is broken down with some basic science and ingredient background, methods and safety discussion, then the recipes themselves. The recipes are further classified as hard, soft, transparent, flexible, (3d) printed materials, colouring and dyeing, long fibres from nature, papermaking, and growing materials. The book then ends with some 'inspiration' projects that their students have made from the recipes in the book.

Some of the materials are going to require a bit of sourcing to manage, but the fact that they've published a recipe book for material science exploring sustainable, tree-based raw materials is spectacular.

The cookbook itself is available for €30.00 or as a free download pdf. You can check out some of the images from inside the 'cookbook' on this article (or they're all in the pdf.)

And, in case they make the free download disappear, I've uploaded the pdf to my Google Drive.