PLAEX vs. Lumber
Can you guess how old the most ancient piece of wood ever found is?
The use of wood as a construction material predates written history. The oldest evidence of wood used for construction dates back to 400,000 years ago in France. The oldest piece of intact wood that was ever found came from an ancient crate-like object which was made an estimated 7,275 years ago.
For most of human history, wood has been an invaluable resource and the first choice for building communities. However, times have changed and houses are now over twice as large as they used to be. The average North American home is 2500 sq ft, meaning it would take around 50 fully-grown trees to build a family home. Considering there are only 0.29 homes on earth for each person, a lot of new construction is required to support our ever-growing population. If one new home were built to house every 2 people on earth, we would require 1.7 billion new homes. Can you guess how many trees would be required if we made these homes from lumber? (answer: 85 billion)
What would the future of housing look like if we had an alternate, less environmentally damaging, mainstream building material?
I know what you're thinking, "Wood is a renewable resource. There's nothing wrong with using lumber as a building material!" In which case, you would be absolutely correct! The problem is, an average of 15 billion trees are cut down annually, and only around 5 billion are replanted. The way we currently use wood is not renewable. In fact, if we change nothing about how we use wood; we will lose over 50% of our tree population in the next 150 years from just human tree felling!
How do we make these massive global changes to make our world a more sustainable place?
To answer this, we must first dive into the process of turning trees into building materials.
Ideally, trees are visually inspected to decide which ones are ready to be felled, although often clear-cutting is still an industry standard. Then, if a direct road does not exist in the area, one is cut and graded using bulldozers. Usually, the road is graveled.
The felling is done using gasoline-powered chain saws or large diesel logging equipment. Once the trees are down, the limbs are trimmed off and the tree is cut into lengths most convenient for transportation.
Depending on whether the land is flat or steep, different sorts of large machines are used to load the felled logs onto trucks using wheeled log loaders.
The log loaders make their way to the lumber mill. Upon arrival, giant mobile unloaders grab the load and stack it in log piles.
Next, logs are picked up from the pile using loaders and placed on a conveyor to bring them to the mill. From there, the bark is removed using grinding wheels or high-pressured water. This bark is then either used for fuel in the lumber mill or sold as decorative garden mulch.
Next, optical sensors scan each log to measure the log and locate imperfections. This information is then used by a computer to determine the optimal cutting pattern to maximize the number of lumber pieces.
The logs are then fed through a bandsaw. The first cuts of a log have the natural curvatures of the original tree trunk and these pieces are usually discarded and ground to make paper pulp or bioenergy feedstock. The rest of the log is then cut to make as many boards as possible.
The boards are sent through additional saws where they are cut into the required widths and the outside edges are trimmed square.
The cut boards are then sent to an area to be dried, typically a kiln, to prevent decay and to allow the wood to shrink naturally before use.
The final step in the lumber production process is planning. This is where the boards are sent through rotating cutting heads (plainer) to trim the boards to their final dimensions, smooth all 4 sides and round out the edges.
Then, the boards are sold to customers.
The waste from construction using lumber doesn't stop there, however. After concrete, wood is the second-largest component of construction debris. Wood accounts for 10% of all material deposited into landfills annually. Now that you understand just how wasteful the process of turning trees into houses can be, we can return to the question, "What would the future of housing look like if we had an alternate, less environmentally damaging, mainstream building material?"
Thankfully, the future of housing looks promising with PLAEX products!
PLAEX turns waste into a resource with our unique material, PLAEX-Crete. Turning under and unrecycled waste into an ultra-durable material has significantly fewer steps, and is much less wasteful, than turning trees into a building material.
Plastic waste is sourced from specific extended producer responsibility (EPR) partners, typically farm and agricultural waste, and is palleted, labeled then sent to the nearest PLAEX production facility.
Next, the plastic waste is processed at a local PLAEX production facility and made into PLAEX-Crete, a unique composite comprised of 90+% recycled materials.
Finally, PLAEX-Crete is formed into the shape of PLAEX products, then sold to clients and customers.
Unlike with lumber, no additional waste is created with the PLAEX building process. Even though all PLAEX products are made to last a lifetime, they can also be recycled into new products. This is because all structures made from PLAEX-Crete are designed ahead of time and fit together perfectly to form exactly the structure in the plan, and no cutting or mortar is required. This eliminates the issue of human error, it's so simple that any DIY builder or contractor would save enormous amounts of time and costs.
The future of construction is sustainable.
Are you ready to build a better future with PLAEX?
