SPEAKER_02: to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Bombas makes clothing designed for warm weather. From soft breezy layers that you can move in with ease, to socks that wick sweat and cushion every step. Socks, underwear, and t-shirts are the number one, two, and three most requested items in homeless shelters. That's why for every comfy item you purchase, Bombas donates another comfy item to someone in need. Every item is seamless, tagless, and effortlessly soft. Bombas are the clothes that you'll want to get dressed and move in every day. I'm telling you, you are excited when you've done the laundry recently and the Bombas socks are at the top of the sock drawer because your feet are about to feel good all day long. Go to B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I and use code 99 P-I for 20% off your first purchase. That's Bombas, B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash 99 P-I code 99 P-I. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Today's show is about something so tiny and unremarkable and ubiquitous that I can't quite believe we're doing a whole episode about it. It's sand, the tiny grains of eroded rock that we sculpt into castles at the beach. Sand might not seem like a topic worthy of our attention, but Vince Bizer wrote a whole book about sand. It's called The World in a Grain, and I promise you, it is fascinating. Here's my conversation with Vince all about sand and how it transformed our civilization. You know, when you were spending a few years on this, I imagine you told someone you were working on a book about sand, what was the look on their face and how did you explain it to them to make them understand how cool and important this subject is? So every single
SPEAKER_01: time I would get this look that was just like, huh? Like, why am I trapped? You know, why am I trapped in a conversation with this person who's about to, you know, who's so obsessed with the most boring thing on earth? And basically my comeback was, why would I write a book about what sounds like the most boring thing in the world? And the reason is because sand is actually the most important solid substance on earth. It's the literal foundation of modern civilization. Yeah. And so how do we use sand in our daily lives? So basically, if you look
SPEAKER_01: around you right now, I don't know where you are, but chances are excellent. No matter what kind of building or office or room you're sitting in the floor underneath you, the walls around the ceiling overhead, the building you're sitting in is probably made at least partly out of concrete. Just like every shopping mall, every apartment building, every office tower everywhere in the world from Beijing to Lagos is made out of concrete. And what is concrete? Concrete is nothing but sand and gravel that's been stuck together. The roads that connect all those buildings also made out of sand. They're either concrete or they're asphalt. Asphalt is also just sand that's been glued together. The windows in every one of those buildings are made of sand. Glass is nothing but sand that's been melted down. The silicon chips that power our computers, our cell phones also made from sand. In other words, without sand, no modern civilization. And here's the real kicker. We are starting to run out. How is that possible? It feels like there's so much sand in the world. There
SPEAKER_01: is a lot of sand in the world. It's actually the most abundant thing on the planet, but we are also using way more of it than ever before in human history. We use more sand than any other natural resource in the world except for air and water. We use about 50 billion tons of the stuff every single year, which is enough to cover the entire state of California. Why don't we just go to the Sahara and take all the sand there? Right.
SPEAKER_01: Great question. So there is, of course, you know, practically infinite amounts of sand in the desert. The problem is that sand is pretty much useless to us. The reason is that desert sand has a different shape. The actual grains are shaped differently than the sand grains that you find at the bottom of rivers or on beaches. It's been eroded by wind rather than water over thousands and millions of years. And as a result, the grains are a lot rounder and smoother than the grains that you find at the bottom of rivers. So the number one thing that we need sand for by far is concrete. And that desert sand just doesn't lock together to form a strong, stable structure that you need for concrete. It's like the difference between trying to build something out of a stack of little marbles as opposed to a stack of little bricks. So all that desert sand, pretty much useless. And so we have
SPEAKER_02: to get it from water eroded sand that comes off of mountains and then accumulates in rivers and things like that. That's the sand we need. Exactly, exactly. And this is why it becomes
SPEAKER_01: such a problem because, you know, when you're talking about extracting millions of tons of sand from the bottom of a lake or the bottom of a river, inevitably we are doing tremendous environmental damage to get at that sand, ripping up riverbeds, stripping beaches bare, stripping lake bottoms bare, even digging it up out of the ocean, causing huge environmental damage all over the world. And in some places, supplies have gotten so tight that organized crime has actually moved into the industry. There's a black market in sand. So the demand
SPEAKER_02: for sand is so intense that it's actually leading to global conflict. It's true. There's
SPEAKER_01: so much demand for sand that in many places around the world, people are being imprisoned, tortured and murdered by the hundreds over sand. And the violence is probably at its worst in India where they actually call them the sand mafia. But it's by no means the only place in Kenya, in Indonesia, in Gambia, in many other places around the world. Same kind of thing. People are fighting and killing and dying over sand. Wow. And you've actually
SPEAKER_02: witnessed some of this in India. You witnessed some of the crime associated with the sand trade. Yeah, absolutely. This is what got me started on it is I just stumbled across
SPEAKER_01: an article about the murder of a farmer in India. And what really caught my eye was that he had been killed over sand. And you know, at that point, I was like most people, I'd never even thought about sand in my life. I'd never given it a second thought beyond like, how am I going to get this sand out of my bathing suit? You know, but then I did
SPEAKER_01: a little more research and found that especially in India, hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. And I just thought that was the craziest thing I'd ever heard of. Like what, what in the world would make sand so valuable, so important that people would kill for it. And what I discovered was that it's sand is really the substance that we need to build cities out of. And in India, as in most of the developing world, right in China, in Nigeria, Indonesia, you name it, we're building cities at a rate and at a speed that has never happened before in human history, which means we need huge amounts of sand.
SPEAKER_02: Beiser says that today, massive amounts of sand are being moved around the world to fuel our growing appetite for glass and computer chips and asphalt. And over the years, sand has morphed from the literal ground beneath us into a commodity that's mined and refined and sold in a global marketplace. And while sand is the basis of so many different products, by far the biggest driver of the demand for sand is the production of concrete. Yeah, it's, I mean, the story of concrete is completely fascinating to me. I didn't
SPEAKER_01: know anything about it until I started the research for this book. You make concrete by taking sand and gravel and gluing them together with cement. And you can make cement in a few different ways, but basically you take a substance like lime and you bake it down and it turns into a powder. And then when you mix that powder with water, it forms this paste that glues together all that sand and aggregate. But the real magic of it is it does more than just harden, it actually forms a chemical bond between all those, the constituent parts between the grains of sand and the gravel and the cement, which is why it's such a great building material, right? Because it's really, really strong. It's really flexible. Anyway, so there are at least a couple, three ancient civilizations that somehow figured out how to do this. The ancient Mayans used a form of concrete. Ancient Egyptians might have had a form of cement, but it was the Romans who really figured it out. And they actually used concrete in a really extensive way. They built roads out of it. They built aqueducts out of it. They built buildings out of it that are still standing today. Like the Pantheon in Rome has a concrete roof that's over 2000 years old and it's still standing. So but here's the really bizarre twist. So the Romans figured out how to use concrete, used it to great effect for centuries. But then when the Roman Empire collapsed, the world sort of forgot how to make concrete. Like the secret of concrete making kind of disappeared with the Roman Empire and nobody built anything with concrete for about 1500 years. Quick side note. I love this story because I feel like it's this trope that you
SPEAKER_02: see in a lot of science fiction and fantasy that there's this ancient forgotten knowledge that holds the key to the future. But the thing about that trope is that it basically never exists in the real world except for the story of concrete. Concrete is this amazing technology that gets completely forgotten for hundreds of years until the turn of the century and then it re-emerges in a big way. And what really made the big change was an
SPEAKER_01: architect named Ernest Ransom, who's a British architect who had emigrated to the United States set up shop in San Francisco. And he started tinkering around with cement and with concrete and figuring out different ways to perfect the mix. And eventually, literally through tinkering in his backyard, he came up with the idea of reinforced concrete, which is concrete with those steel bars running through it. And that was Ernest Ransom's great innovation. Basically, he found that by putting steel bars inside the concrete, the concrete would bind to those bars and it would massively increase the tensile strength of the concrete. And he realized, wow, this is an incredible building material. I can build the walls and the roofs of structures with this stuff and it'll be cheap and it'll be strong and holy smokes, this is the material of the future, thought Ernest Ransom. So he ran around the country trying to sell people on this idea and basically people laughed at him. They were just like, why in the world would we even try this crazy new building material? We build with stone, we build with bricks, we build with timber. These things have been tried and trusted for centuries. Why on earth would we take a chance on your wacky new idea? So he literally tries for years and years to sell people on this idea and he gets a few commissions. He manages to build a few, get a few buildings built out of concrete in a couple of different places, two or three of them in San Francisco where he lives. So then comes 1906, the great San Francisco earthquake. Massive earthquake demolishes most of the
SPEAKER_01: city, followed by an enormous fire that basically burns San Francisco to the ground. But when the smoke clears and the dust is settled, some of the very few structures left standing in San Francisco are Ernest Ransom's reinforced concrete buildings. And that was a real turning point. People all around the country and in fact all around the world looked at that and said, wow, that concrete stuff, that really works. It withstood the earthquake, it withstood the fire, that stuff looks great.
SPEAKER_02: In your book, you talk about how the new concrete industry that was developing really took advantage of these images from the San Francisco fire and the concrete warehouses that survived as a way to argue that like, hey, check out this amazing new fire safe and earthquake proof material.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely. They pushed themselves to builders, to engineers, to the general public in a really big way, advertising themselves really as the material of the future. And in fact, it is. I mean, concrete is an amazingly versatile and useful material. It's very easy to work with. It's cheap and it's really strong as long as you build it correctly. But you can see it. I mean, I sort of trawled through a lot of newspapers at the time and I mean, it was almost like computers and digital technology in the nineties, just the way that journalists were writing about this stuff is just like, oh, amazing science has revolutionized our way of building. Nevermore will we have to worry about fire like, you know, as though concrete was going to solve every problem known to man. It was really, people were just ecstatic over it. And in fact, Thomas Edison, he was just in love with concrete. He thought concrete was going to be, you know, was, was not only going to be an important building material, but that basically you could build anything out of concrete. He built several completely all concrete houses in which he furnished with concrete furniture. He even built a concrete piano that he sent touring around the country.
SPEAKER_02: It does actually allow architects to be quite inventive because of its, you know, its ability to be shaped in all different kinds of ways.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, you look at things, structures like, like the Guggenheim or, you know, the Sydney opera house, these, you know, incredibly fanciful and beautiful creations. You couldn't make those things out of bricks, you know, or stone. Yeah. No concrete is, you know, in addition to, to making it easy to, to build really strong durable structures, it makes it possible to build some of the most beautiful and inventive structures in the world. Not to mention the most useful. I mean, things like, you know, these enormous dams that really made possible the modern Southwest in a lot of ways.
SPEAKER_02: And so we went through, in the Western world, we went through our phase of building a lot of concrete in the 20th century, and now there's a huge growth in cities in Asia and Africa. So is that where a lot of the sand is going today?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So we, I mean, we're still building, of course, in the Western world, we still use a lot of sand and a lot of concrete here, but it is absolutely dwarfed. The amounts that we use in the Western world is absolutely dwarfed by what's going on in the developing world. And the reason for that is number one, there's more and more people in the world all the time, right? Populations growing and more and more of them are moving into cities all the time. The same thing that happened in this country a hundred years ago, people left the agricultural countryside, they left farming villages and moved into cities. Well, the same thing is happening in India and China, all over Africa, but on a much bigger scale and in a much faster rate, in a much more compressed timeframe. So to give you an idea, we're adding the equivalent of eight New York cities to the world every single year. Wow. Yeah. Here's another way to think about it. The amount of concrete that we use every single year is enough to build a wall 88 feet high, 88 feet wide, right around the equator every year. And most of that is happening in the developing world and more than anywhere else, it's happening in China. China is far and away the world's number one consumer of sand and of concrete. Hundreds of millions of people in China have moved from the countryside into cities in the last decade or two. And remember, of course, cities are made of concrete. And
SPEAKER_02: so where is China's sand coming from? Yeah, so the thing with sand is you always want
SPEAKER_01: to get it from somewhere close to where you're going to actually use it because sand is very heavy. The cubic yard of sand weighs more than a ton. So if you have to transport it more than a few miles, the cost of it goes up very quickly. So basically, builders in China and everywhere else are always looking for sand that's close by. So think about Shanghai, for example. Shanghai is one of these cities that has just exploded in the last 20 years. More skyscrapers have been built in Shanghai in the last 20 years than there are in all of New York City. So obviously, they are using just a staggering amount of sand. Where's it all coming from? Well, in the early part of this century, they were getting most of it from the Yangtze River. They were just scooping it right off the bottom of the Yangtze River. And that caused a lot of problems. Number one, it was causing riverbanks to literally collapse. When you dig out the middle of the river, the sides of the river often just collapse, taking with it agricultural land, villages. It snarls up shipping in a really terrible way. And it also does serious damage to the river's ecosystem, right? Anything that was living on the bottom of the river obviously is gone. Their habitat's just been destroyed. And also, when you silt up the water like that, it blocks the sunlight from reaching plants that are growing underneath the water. So huge, huge damage. And the Chinese authorities realized this. They were like, whoa, this is a serious problem for the Yangtze River, which is an incredibly important resource for China. It's the source of drinking water for hundreds of millions of people, fish, et cetera, et cetera. So they had to ban by sand mining on the Yangtze River. As a result, sand miners just sort of pushed their operations a few dozen miles upstream to the biggest freshwater lake in China. It's called Lake Poyang. So Lake Poyang has now become the biggest sand mine in the world. It's about 230 odd million tons of sand are scooped out of this lake every year. And that now, of course, is starting to generate its own set of environmental problems. It's causing real damage to the many, many fish and birds that live there, including endangered species like freshwater porpoises. So basically, where does China get its sand from? It gets it from wherever is handy. And when you put that much pressure on whatever river or lake or whatever is handy, it causes problems inevitably. Yeah. I mean, is this a race to the bottom or are we just going to run out of sand?
SPEAKER_01: So we're not going to completely run out of sand anytime in the foreseeable future. We're not going to be fighting over the very last little pile of the last few grains on earth. But what's happening with sand is much more like what's happening with oil and gas, right? There's still a lot of it on the planet. But the stuff that's easy to get at has been mostly tapped out. The stuff that's close to the surface and cheap and easy to get our hands on is increasingly disappearing. And we're having to go further and further and do more and more damage to get at the stuff that's left. So the same thing that you see happening with oil where we're having to do things like fracking and offshore oil drilling to get at the oil that's left, similar kind of thing is happening with sand. We're having to dig deeper and deeper and do more and more damage to get at the dwindling supplies of sand.
SPEAKER_02: Beyond the damage that you can inflict on the land by mining the sand, what is the cost of concrete to the planet?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So concrete has some very significant costs. Number one is carbon emissions. So manufacturing cement is, depending on how you measure it, either the second or the third biggest carbon dioxide emitter, greenhouse gas emitter on the planet. The energy that's required it takes a lot of a lot of energy to incinerate all the lime that you need to make cement, number one. And also the process itself gives off a lot of gases. So it creates somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of all greenhouse gases are created by the cement industry and of course you need cement to make concrete. So that's number one. Number two is that by covering so much ground with concrete you create in a lot of places what's called the urban heat island effect. The sun's heat gets soaked up and held by all that concrete. The temperature of cities can be raised by as much as 10 or 15 degrees just due to the fact that the concrete is retaining all of that heat. And that's obviously a big problem in a world that's getting hotter all the time. There's another effect impact that it can have which is that it can make flooding worse because for the most part concrete is not porous right? Water flows over it. So for instance what happened in the last set of floods in Houston is it made those floods worse because when those rivers overflow their banks all that water goes pouring into cities and it has nowhere to go. It just flows through the concrete streets of the cities so it can really exacerbate flooding in a really serious way.
SPEAKER_02: Do we need to build with as much concrete as we do? No, in a nutshell. I mean listen we need concrete right? This is not right it's not analogous
SPEAKER_01: to oil right? Which is something that we can actually replace with something cleaner and more sustainable with you know with solar and wind. Concrete is a great building material. It has created safe durable housing for billions of people the world over who didn't have it 20-30 years ago. That's to the good. So we need concrete we got to keep using it but yeah we could use a lot less of it. How could we do that? Well first of all by figuring
SPEAKER_01: out ways to restructure how we live in so that we don't need quite as much infrastructure. Cars being the most obvious example but also just by making things smaller. I mean I just got back I was just giving some talks about about my book in the Netherlands and the size of the hotel rooms that I stayed in would shock any hotel staying American. I mean they are tiny. There's room for a bed a single bed and a little desk and a window and a little sink and that's it right there. I mean you could literally fit two or three of these rooms in the average Motel 6 room. You know it's kind of shocking when you first walk into a room that size but really like who cares. I was in most of these towns for one night I'd go in I'd you know do a little work on my computer go to sleep get up pack up and leave. I didn't need more than that's I didn't need more than that amount of space. If you think about all the millions of hotel and motel rooms in this country we could easily cut many of them in half. You know or houses I mean you know Americans famously we build giant houses we love to have big huge sprawling tract houses and the size of the average American home by the way has nearly doubled just in the last couple of decades. We don't need that much space. You don't need six bathrooms in your house. We could ease you know really we could easily cut down you know create a system of extra taxes or tax incentives or whatever to encourage people to live smaller and I submit we would be no less happy living that way. Right. Are there other materials we could be using? Yeah so that's the other
SPEAKER_01: thing there is a lot of research going on around the world to come up with other materials that we could use in concrete rather than sand. So there are people who are looking at using a bamboo or shredded plastic or recycled tires shredded tires or hemp actually there's a thing there's a product called hempcrete which you can actually buy right now and all those things I think help I think they're all to the good I think they should all be encouraged. But at the end of the day there's only so far we can go with with alternative materials because the end like I said we use 50 billion tons of sand and gravel every year and even if we could replace all that sand with you know bamboo where are we going to come up with 50 billion tons of bamboo every year right that would create its own set of problems. Right. I mean I think the real way to think about the sand crisis is to kind of reframe the question. The question isn't really what's going to happen when we run out of sand. The question is what's going to happen when we run out of everything. We shouldn't just be thinking about like how can we solve the problem of sand because really it sounds familiar right. We know that we're using too much fresh water. We know that we're cutting down too many trees. We know we're harvesting too many fish out of the oceans. We know we're burning too much fossil fuel. And now come to find out we're using too much sand. Well to my mind these are not separate problems. They're all symptoms of the same problem which is just that we're consuming too much right. The way that we live here in the Western world and that lifestyle that we've now exported to the rest of the world it just consumes way too many natural resources and the planet simply can't sustain it. Now we're going to I think we're going to hit that wall with water sooner than we're going to hit it with sand. But ultimately it's the same problem which is just that the way that we live our lives just isn't sustainable. We have got to find ways to build our cities which is where most human beings now live in ways that use fewer resources. That's the only way we're going to avoid total calamity.
SPEAKER_02: Vince Weiser's book is called The World in a Grain. There is so much more to the story of sand that we didn't even touch on here including how glass changed civilization. That's a big deal. So if you like this discussion you'll love the book. There's a lot of sand locked up in all the concrete in the built world but there's also a lot of embodied carbon in concrete. We'll talk about how to quantify that and concrete alternatives after this. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts even as they respond to emergencies. Donate today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. Brands need to use their logos, colors and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at Canva.com, the home for every brand.
SPEAKER_02: This show is sponsored by better help. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking, your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. It basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that. So you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give better help a try. It's entirely online designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with better help. Get betterhelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp. H-E-L-P.com slash invisible. Concrete is the building industry's favorite material, but it's a problematic fave. And not only because of the global sand crisis. As Vince Beiser noted, concrete is also extremely carbon intensive. The production of cement, which is the key ingredient in concrete, is responsible for about 8% of the world's CO2 emissions. And so we thought we'd spend this section of the program talking about the climate change impacts of the buildings we create, whether they're made of concrete or wood or some novel material you've never even heard of. And to do that, I called up Kate Simonin.
SPEAKER_00: I'm Kate Simonin and I'm an architect, instructional engineer, and faculty member at the University of Washington. And my research is focused on the environmental impact of building materials. When we think about the environmental impact of buildings, most people really do think about the environmental impact of operating them.
SPEAKER_02: The energy cost of operating a building is stuff you probably know, all the energy that it takes to heat the building and cool the building and keep the lights on. But Kate says that when we think about buildings and climate change, that is not the full picture. There are also the emissions associated with the materials themselves, the emissions that were required to make all that concrete and steel and glass.
SPEAKER_00: The factories, the steel mills, the trucks that drive around, all of those create emissions. And those emissions are termed the embodied emissions. So the emissions that are sort of embodied in the materials, although they're really the emissions that happened when making the materials.
SPEAKER_02: These emissions are known as embodied carbon, the carbon emissions that were needed to create the built environment all around us. Kate heads up the Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington. It's a group of builders and designers and academics working to reduce embodied carbon. And she says that new materials and greener manufacturing are important for the future. But the first thing we can do to reduce embodied carbon is just to keep using the buildings we've already built.
SPEAKER_00: If we can keep what we have, that's the first best step to reducing embodied carbon. So renovating buildings and maintaining them is key. We've invested a lot in that concrete. And so let's make our choices correctly when we choose to make new things and maintain and keep the things that we have. But even so, we know there's going to be a building boom in the coming decades. We need
SPEAKER_02: new housing, new green energy infrastructure, new transportation. And if all those structures are being made using traditional steel and concrete, it is going to be a problem for the climate. But Kate says there are a lot of potential low carbon building materials out there these days, including alternative concretes and low carbon steel.
SPEAKER_00: And there's exciting new technologies that are growing rocks by capturing carbon from the atmosphere or at smokestacks and turning it back into limestone. So that if we talk about carbon capture and storage, think about carbon capture and using that carbon to build buildings with so we could take those rocks and turn them into buildings.
SPEAKER_02: That kind of carbon capture technology is a long way from becoming a reality. But one of the most promising green building materials that people are using right now is actually one of the oldest building materials on earth. Wood. A wooden building stores carbon within it. And so if you can build with more wood instead of concrete, you have the potential to dramatically reduce the embodied carbon emissions. You could potentially even have a building that is a net carbon negative. And with that goal in mind, architects and engineers are developing large manufactured wood products that they call mass timber. So mass timber is a term that defines wood
SPEAKER_00: buildings that are made out of large pieces of wood. So massive pieces of wood. You make
SPEAKER_02: mass timber products by layering sheets of wood on top of one another and then compressing them to create extremely strong prefabricated wood panels that can be assembled into all kinds of structures. Architects are beginning to experiment with using mass timber to build anything from skyscrapers to bridges. And the advantage of mass timber is that the thick
SPEAKER_00: pieces of wood have an inherent fire resistant characteristic to them. So imagine if you're trying to build a campfire and you make it out of little small sticks, they all burn up and you get a pile of ash. But if you start with really big pieces of wood and then you fall asleep and let the fire burn itself out, you come back and you still have a log in your fireplace. So that's the same thing that happens with buildings. With a heavy timber building, it sort of almost puts itself out.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, how a skyscraper behaves in fire is one thing, but it feels strange to think about skyscrapers made of wood at all. You know, like in a modern age. Well, why is anything weird? Things are just weird because we haven't heard of them. If
SPEAKER_00: you went back 150 years, nobody would have heard of a steel building. And they were worried about cast iron. So they were cast iron buildings and cast iron melted and people were very concerned about it. So if you look back in time, there's been massive innovations about what we do. And if you look back in time, there's been massively large, tall wood buildings that have built and lasted a long period of time. So we learn a trade that is handed down to us from other people. So a lot of what we learn, we've been told of what works. And so we have confidence in things because they've been done before. So I don't think it's unreasonable to be a little conservative. I mean, we wouldn't want to build a high rise building that burns and kills lots of people, nor would we want to build a building that wasn't able to maintain over a long period of time. You know, if I step back and think, if my driver is climate change and my driver is climate change, in order to have the building sector be part of the climate solution, we're going to have to take some risks. And so one of the risks will be trying novel materials and new methods of using those materials to drive to a market where we have carbon negative buildings.
SPEAKER_02: Cities full of carbon negative wooden skyscrapers is definitely an attractive vision. And Kate says that wooden buildings have the potential to be carbon negative, but it's not that straightforward. You have to really analyze every aspect of the supply chain before you can make such a declaration. One of the most important things to consider is where that wood is coming from.
SPEAKER_00: Because the forest itself is pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. And if you take wood out of the forest, you're changing the forest carbon balance.
SPEAKER_02: So in order for wood to be a great building material for the climate, you have to make sure that it's being harvested sustainably.
SPEAKER_00: And with wood products, we need to be careful that we don't set up a system that incentivize wasting wood and chopping down forests and not replanting them.
SPEAKER_02: Kate Simonin says that mass timber isn't a perfect building material. There is no perfect building material. But building stuff always involves difficult choices and trade-offs. And it's Kate's goal to make sure that architects and builders are considering embodied carbon when they make their decisions about what to build and how to build it. Because we're all going to be living with the consequences.
SPEAKER_00: Embodied carbon is upfront. These are the emissions that happen when we build things now. We're going to be building a new New York every month until 2050 across the world. Those emissions are huge. And if we don't figure out how to address them, we're not going to meet climate targets. So more and more people are recognizing that, looking for strategies to figure out how to reduce and drive the market to low carbon solutions.
SPEAKER_02: 99% invisible's impact design coverage is funded in part by Autodesk. Autodesk supports the design and creation of innovative solutions to the world's most pressing social and environmental challenges, including technologies to anticipate and respond to challenges facing the construction industry. Autodesk is a proud partner of EC3, the embodied carbon calculator for construction. EC3 is a free open source tool to help design and construction professionals make climate-smart choices about what materials to use in construction. Depending on how it was made, one steel beam may have much lower embodied carbon than another one that looks and performs the same. EC3 reveals the embodied carbon of the materials going into our buildings, empowering architects, engineers, and contractors to make informed choices, selecting the materials that have the lowest environmental impact, and providing transparency for a more sustainable built environment. To learn more and check out EC3 for yourself, you can visit buildingtransparency.org or go to autodesk.redshift.com to explore more on the future of making. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmet Fitzgerald, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is the senior producer, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor Delaney Hall, Sharif Yousif, Avery Truffleman, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% Invisible is a member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radio-topia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram and Reddit too. But the concrete foundation of 99pi is 99pi.org.
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SPEAKER_03: Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome. It's my pleasure to be here. Oh, and it's Fruit Loops, just so you know. Fruit. Fruit. Yeah, fruit. No, it's Fruit Loops. The same way you say, studio. That's not how we say it. Fruit Loops. Find the Loopy side.
