Wooden Skyscrapers

In todays world “going green” is a really big deal. A lot of companies are going green and try to make green products. But there is a misconception about building wooden structures. When we think about building things out of wood some of the concerns are that the structure is very flammable and not as strong as steel and concrete. The other concern is deforestation and green house gases. Michael Green did  a TED talk called “Why we should build wooden skyscrapers." He has come up with a way to make large pieces of wood by glueing smaller pieces together. That may sound like plywood to you but its different. These panels are 8 feet wide and 64 feet long. By making a the panels like this the building are as strong as steel and concrete skyscrapers. When people hear his idea, certain things come to mind. One big one is wood if its a wooden building it can catch fire very easily. He explains it like this, if you hold up a log and take a match to it, it wont burn. But if you have tiny pieces of wood it burns and eventually you can put the big log on. And when the big log catches fire it takes a long time for it to burn. 

If a wooden skyscraper where built it would hold a lot of carbon. A 20 story wooden building would make 3150 tones of carbon. But it store over 4,360 tones of carbon. 1000 tones carbon is like 900 cars on the road. So that would be like taking 900 cars of the road. Michael Green is planing on building a 30 story skyscraper in Canada.