Belgian design collective Draw Me A Sheep notes:
‘Round’ is perfect in nature, but ‘square’ is perfect for industrial standard. To illustrate, square tree would enable wood industry to lose less material, to cut easier with machines and to store more efficiently.
C'mon, Monsanto, where are you when we need you?...
Lots of companies have "guides"- that simply take you around their own products. EcoTimber, (seen on TreeHugger here) which has been selling sustainably harvested wood since 1992, has produced a wood guide that is well laid out, fairly complete, and as they say on Fox, "fair and balanced"- a really useful resource if you are considering a wood floor. ...
Here is an equation we like:
Waste by-product + modern technology + socially responsible labor = Engineered Timber Resources Products
A great example of what they do is with Mulberry. This tree has been cultivated for thousands of years for silk production, and needs pruning to flourish. the branches are then stripped of their bark for medicinal purposes. And the twigs, as much as 15 tons per hectare? garbage, usually burned for for heat. Enter ETR.
...
The high price of oil and gas makes wood pellets a heating alternative, particularly in the Northeast, which relies on oil to heat homes. Wood pellets are made from sawdust, shavings, or ground wood chips which are compressed under high pressure and turned into pellets. The International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report about the wood pellet industry in November 2007. The report covered ten years, from 1997 to 2007.
Earthfirst titles a post " Nokia Cell Phone Made of Sustainably Harvested Wood", thinks it a lovely idea and quotes Cellphone Beat, which writes in Nokia goes green with wooden body phone " This Nokia eco-friendly concept flaunts a wooden body made from sustainable timber. The design features an 8-megapixel camera, bluetooth, speaker and a Symbian S60 Operating System." ...
What you are looking at in the picture is roughly the minimum amount of fire wood (2.2 cords, roughly 4 imperial tons) it takes to "casually" heat a 1,900 ft2 home in Southeastern Pennsylvania, starting with occasional cold nights in October, becoming a daily routine by the end of November, and scaling back to cold nights sometime in mid-March. "Casual" heating means that the traditional oil furnace is available for backup on lazy weekend mornings, when away for work, or for errands. (Full time wood heating means at least another cord, maybe two more, are needed.)
Cobbleblock™ & Cobblewood™ Flooring: fabricated from antique beams, sliced cross-grain, sanded & triple oiled. Also available in pine. Awesome.
Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh
Paul Stankey of HiveModular, along with family and friends, is building a storage barn using pallets from their pals at Loll Designs. The barn is to store materials for the Stankeys’ Rustic Reuse container cabin. What a great idea. See the blog for the story and more pics.
Coal is getting more expensive: especially the high grade US stuff that Europe wants to burn. The less expensive coals are more highly polluting and have lower heat value, making it harder to meet discharge/emission limits, and harder still to dispose of solid waste. One solution is to substitute wood for coal, typically in the 10% to 20% range.
Substituting "biofuel" for coal also lowers the per kW C02 emissions, which, if combined with energy conservation, and with wind or solar power capacity additions, helps a utility meets its Greenhouse Gas (GHG) reduction commitments. Then there is the whole green jobs component.
image via KK’s Street Use
The modern bicycle as we know it, originated from the “dandy horse,” invented in 1816 by German baron Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Drais de Sauerbronn. Notwithstanding this, there have been countless bicycle-like designs beforehand. Indeed, yonks ago two-wheelers were not made of metal, they were all made of wood.
“Varia wood is a translucent ultra thin sliced wood veneer as the soul and with ecoresin as the body. This ingenious new material redefines a classic material by creating light transmission and formability. Illuminated razor thin walnut, rosewood and zebrano veneers create a striking, warm and natural texture. The resin is made from recycled PETG such as old milk cartons and detergent bottles.”
Four woods are available: Rosewood, Walnut, Zebrano Chevron (shown above) and Zebrano Slip Match. What would you do with this?
Zoning determines the value of land, and if your site is zoned for a twelve storey building you can be pretty sure that anything that is a lot smaller is not going to be around for long. You could build it cheap and fast (like they do in North America) or you could design for deconstruction, as Alberto Mozó did for BIP computers in Santiago, Chile. The entire structure is made from laminated timber and can be dismantled and reconstructed elsewhere. ...
One can build a house out of wood and cover it up, or one can celebrate the nature of wood, as this one in Slavonice, Czech Republic does. Designed by E - M.R.A.K. | Martin Rajniš, Kamila Amblerová, Václav Horecký, it is built out of unplaned, uncut wood piled on top of each other, and held together only by its construction weight to make it completely adaptable. It is basically a pile of lumber....
Latest in wood design at the Milan Furniture Salon (MocoLoco here) is this wood-clad Fujitsu notebook with the catchy name FMV-BIBLO NX95Y/D, also known as the "Woodshell." It is covered in "forest-thinned" cedar and 30% of the housing and plastic parts are made from corn-based bioplastics.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Technorati