Researcher creates concrete with pine beetle wood

[tuvor]

(Not sure if this is the best place for this story, but since the pine beetle is a big environmental deal in BC, I thought it wouldn't be entirely inappropriate.)

University of Nothern B.C. looking for investors in new product

A student researcher at the University of Northern B.C. in Prince George has come up with a possible use for the billions of trees killed by the mountain pine beetle.

Sorin Pasca, a master's degree student in natural resources and environmental studies, found that wood attacked by the mountain pine beetle works as "an excellent ingredient for producing concrete," made by mixing cement with water and aggregate.

"Usually the aggregate consists of stones or rocks, but mountain pine beetle wood is a new option," Pasca said.

"Normally, cement repels organic materials such as wood, but for some reason cement sticks to lodgepole pine and this compatibility is even stronger when the tree has been killed, or you could say, enhanced, by the mountain pine beetle."

...

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/09/26/bc-pinebeetlecement.html

[ret5hd]

1. Wow! Termite susceptible concrete! What will they think of next?

[skids]

2. Maybe they can pertrify it...

...exposed to lime like in hempcrete it might become inedible.

[Javaman]

3. In a related story..

Lumber corporations have bought up huge nurseries of mountain pine beetle and have set up operations for an entry into the concrete business.

One lumbermill representative stated, "heck this cuts our overhead. No lumber jacks, no lumber trucks, heck we won't even have saw dust! We don't have to chop them down anymore, we just let the little buggers loose and the beetles do all the work, and best of all, we don't need giant saws any longer, we just grind them up!"

"you are talking about dead forests right?" inquired the interviewer.

"um, no comment", replied the representative.

Further calls to their office have gone unanswered.

[phantom power]

4. Somehow, this perfectly captures the human condition.

"Hey, look! Climate change is destroying the northern pine forests!"

"No problem! I just figured out how to turn all those dead trees into concrete, so we can build more roads and subdivisions and retail outlets...

never mind.

[tuvor]

5. Or to put it another way...

...take a billion lemons and make lemonade.

Beats doing nothing, imo.

[phantom power]

6. Well...

Harvesting that much biomass from an ecosystem already on the ropes, and then binding it up in concrete, where I assume no life-form will have access to it into the forseeable future, is not my idea of "lemonade."

It's more like taking lemons and burying them in the ground, and salting the earth. Or something. Somebody revoke my analogy license.

My idea of "lemonade" might be controlled burns, which used to be a part of the natural population control for pine beetles. Then perhaps growing the forests back with buffer zones (although I've heard that pine beetles are nearly immune to buffer zones due to their reproductive methods), or interspersing other kinds of trees, which may be necessary anyway in a future where the Canadian lattitudes have a climate more like the contemporary United States.

At any rate, at the very least keeping the biomass there, and useable by some kind of ecosystem. Whatever kind of ecosystem we can salvage from the wreckage we're making of the original.