Mass Timber Group Show: Sustainable Building Experts

You're Wrong About Carbon and Tall Mass Timber w/Lloyd Alter

• Brady & Nic

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What if building taller isn't always better? On this episode of The Mass Timber Group Show, we challenge the tall mass timber obsession with our guest, Lloyd Alter, a writer and educator specializing in sustainable design and upfront carbon. Lloyd makes a compelling case for capping mass timber buildings at 15 stories, arguing that pushing these limits can be unnecessary and impractical. Together, we explore the critical concept of upfront carbon, a term Lloyd prefers over "embodied carbon," and examine its profound implications for the construction industry.

We shine a spotlight on the urgent issue of upfront carbon emissions, emphasizing the importance of addressing emissions that occur before a building is even occupied. Using examples from British Columbia, California, and Europe, we discuss how different regions are starting to recognize and tackle these emissions, though progress is often slow and politically fraught. From the debate over gas stoves in the United States to the need for more holistic approaches to carbon reduction, our conversation highlights the real-world challenges of implementing sustainable practices in the building industry.

Looking towards the future, we delve into innovative uses of timber in larger-scale buildings like the Hines T3 and Kendeda Buildings. These examples showcase not only the versatility of timber products but also the potential for sustainable and socially responsible construction. Lloyd wraps up our conversation with a powerful message: "use less stuff." By advocating for minimal consumption and emphasizing longevity in architecture, Lloyd provides practical and profound insights to help us reduce our carbon footprint. Don't miss this thought-provoking episode as we navigate the complexities of mass timber and upfront carbon, with lessons that could shape the future of sustainable construction.

Lloyd's Substack: https://lloydalter.substack.com/

Connect with Lloyd on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lloyd-alter-827ba7/

Email Lloyd Directly at: lloydalter@gmail.com

Lloyd's Book - The Story of Upfront Carbon: https://newsociety.com/book/the-story-of-upfront-carbon/

Looking for your mass timber community? Attend the 2025 Mass Timber Group Summit in Denver Co - Aug 20-22nd!

Speaker 1:

Oh, we're building the tallest mass timber, the tallest mass timber. Some new building comes out and for the next two weeks it's the tallest mass timber building, until the next one comes out. And I think this is ridiculous. The stuff, you know, we're pushing it too far, too high, too fast, to no real end because the stuff's so light. And even Andrew Waugh, who's done more mass timber buildings than anyone in the world with Waugh Thistleton, says they shouldn't be more than 15 stories because you're just getting ridiculous.

Speaker 2:

This is the Mass Timber Group Show. I'm Brady, and on this podcast we caught up with Mr Lloyd Alter. He's a writer and teacher on sustainable design and upfront carbon. I found this conversation fascinating. Specifically, I liked Lloyd's argument against building as tall as we can with mass timber and how, rather than that, we should be focusing on what he and many other experts define as mass timber's sweet spot. The other part you should watch for is what we in the mass timber industry get wrong about our conversations around embodied or rather, as Lloyd would say, upfront carbon. And if you like these podcasts, subscribing to the channel is the biggest compliment you can give us. So with that, let's get into it.

Speaker 1:

Hi, there I am. Previously, I first was an architect many years ago and then became a real estate developer. After that, and while I was doing the real estate developer and building a condo out of concrete and all the problems of building it, I just thought there had to be a better way to build things and I started. After that company, I went to Canada's biggest prefab modular builder and said I want to work with you to bring good designs to your wonderful product, because they were doing the standard stuff at the time and I wanted to hire the best architects and do a really fine product. And I started writing about it to promote myself and what I was selling.

Speaker 1:

This was before there were blogs, before there were podcasts, and I was writing every day, so it was like a proto-blog and suddenly I was like the leading writer and prefab on the internet, because I was the only writer on prefab on the internet. So that actually led me. It turns out that I was a better writer than a prefab salesman and was writing more and more. And a big website in the States called Treehugger asked me to write for them and it got bought by Discovery Network and it just grew and grew and snowballed. One day somebody heard me and they said come and speak to our school. I went to speak to their school. Next thing I knew I was hired and I became an associate professor teaching at Toronto Metropolitan University and Treehugger closed down essentially about a year and a half ago, and since then I've been writing for my own account, my own Substack, and writing books. So that's how I'm here.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for introducing yourself and I know I got introduced to you through your Substack platform maybe seven or eight months ago when you did an article on some mass timber producers out of Durango in Colorado. But a lot of the conversation that I see you talk about a lot and obviously it's a focus of your new book is upfront carbon, which a lot of people in the building industry term or know as embodied carbon. Can you tell me a little bit about why you use the term upfront carbon?

Speaker 1:

Well, nobody understands when you say what embodied carbon is, it makes no sense. The term came. We used to talk about embodied energy, the energy that went into making something, and that was energy going into it. So when carbon became the issue, people just substituted carbon for energy. But it's not embodied. By definition, embodied means in something and the carbon is actually in the atmosphere. It's gone. It's not embodied at all.

Speaker 1:

So I was sitting around on Twitter at the beginning of the pandemic, I guess, with L Ron Burrell, a New Zealand architect, and a fellow named George Chappas, an Australian architect, trying to figure out what can we use instead of embodied carbon. And L Ron said, well, we could call it vomited carbon or spiked carbon or burped carbon. And George said, well, that's a little bit extreme, but what about something like? And we both at the same time said upfront, because that's what the bulk of it is. Now, it just so happened that George was also part of a group putting together a book for the Green World Green Building Council, which they labeled Bringing Embodied Carbon Upfront, and they made it official that the term upfront carbon. They considered everything that A1 to A5 cradle to gate carbon, the carbon that comes in a building that emitted before you hand over the keys. They still use embodied carbon for the carbon from repair and maintenance after.

Speaker 1:

I still think embodied carbon is a lousy term for everything, but I'm thrilled that the thing that we came up with in the Twitter conversation became accepted In Europe. It's in official documents everywhere now, as upfront carbon is what they call A1 to A5 carbon on the chart In Canada. It's accepted, in the US less so. I don't know why, but I bet it'll come there too, because it's becoming almost universal, and that word may well be my legacy, and so that's why the title of my book is the Story of Upfront Carbon how we actually got to this point, hey we're going to get back to the podcast in just a second, but first I have a question for you.

Speaker 2:

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Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you for unpacking that, because I've seen a lot of conversations on LinkedIn, you know, following you and others and using the term upfront, and I can definitely see the distinction based on embodying upfront, depending on where people are in the world. But I also think that there's a distinction between what we're doing in the built environment and what we're doing in our everyday life, which is a lot of what your book is about. Can you tell me kind of the differences and the impacts between those two that you see?

Speaker 1:

Well, what actually I think is the point is that there isn't a difference that everybody should be considered about upfront covered carbon with everything they do, that of all the carbon emissions in the world, only 40% come from buildings and the rest of the other 60% is coming from industry and agriculture and everything else, and it's primarily not powering them. It's power the making steel, making concrete, building cars, making hamburgers all of these things have upfront emissions, and so the whole point of my book was to take the concept, which basically started with buildings, and to stretch it around so that everybody understands it, whether they're involved in buildings or not. And an architect in the UK who I was talking to about says well, you know who's your book for? Is it for architects and builders? I said no, really, it's for their clients. It's so that everybody who's doing anything understands what they're talking about. I think getting people to say upfront carbon instead of embodied carbon is a big part of it.

Speaker 1:

Another part of the phrase that I thought you know we should separate them between now emissions and later emissions. That might be terms to use, because I want people to know that it's the now emissions that really matter. We've got a ceiling set by the IPCC that we can only put so many gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere before we're going to start breaking 1.5 and now 2 and soon 2.5 degrees, because we break those ceilings, those budgets, and every kilogram we put into it is going against those budgets. So you know my iPhone, I keep waving my iPhone around. Apple says 80 kilograms of carbon for something that weighs what a couple of grams. It's huge the proportion of the carbon emissions that go before you even get your iPhone.

Speaker 1:

Buildings you still have to balance the operating emissions against the upfront emissions. You could make decisions that increase the upfront emissions, like putting in more foam insulation, and also decrease the operating emissions. With iPhones and with everything else. It's not such a big deal. It's all upfront that you have to worry about. So that's why I think it's important not to think it's particularly different in buildings, except in buildings again, we have that balance of the upfront and operating. That's more significant.

Speaker 2:

My follow-up question to that is what do you think people get wrong around the conversations with upfront carbon, specifically in buildings?

Speaker 1:

They downplay it, they just don't think about it that much, you know. They say, well, I've always built houses with basements and that's my job, that's what we do in the housing industry, and basements are made of concrete. And if you're telling me I can't build basements anymore, you know, the clients have to change their attitudes. The customers have to change the building codes, have to change the building codes don't even mention the concept of upfront carbon. They just keep saying you know, well, we're going to keep cranking maybe the better insulation and we're going to keep cranking maybe better quality windows, and they're all doing things that actually increase the upfront carbon, instead of looking at it holistically, that you have to think about everything together and worry about both the operating and the upfront. We don't worry enough about the upfront, even though, again, as I say, they're now emissions that are really important.

Speaker 2:

So, specifically in the policy side of things, do you see any provinces, states, countries or whatever that are taking what you would consider the right approach to this balance?

Speaker 1:

Well, in British Columbia, canada and I believe in California, they're beginning to talk about at least asking people for calculations on their upfront carbon emissions. Nobody's doing it in the housing industry. I know that the Passive House people are beginning to talk about it. They've got new software that works with Passive House but generally I still don't think it's seriously on the radar. A lot of people pay lip service to it but they're still building concrete and steel tall buildings.

Speaker 1:

Where I live in Toronto, canada, the city says we're trying to deal with the issue of upfront carbon and embodied carbon and they're asking for information. But they let people come along and knock down perfectly good 15-story rental apartment buildings to build 60-story buildings when that's a total waste and it causes a huge increase in upfront carbon. So if it's talked about at all in most places it's really just lip service at this stage. But that's going to change In Europe. It is changing In Europe. People are coming in with regulations. They're setting up rules, setting up the maximum embodied carbon per square meter and I think we're going to be seeing more and more of that.

Speaker 2:

Do you think that Canada will go before the United States in that direction?

Speaker 1:

Yes, yeah, canada usually does in these things.

Speaker 2:

If you had a crystal ball, what do you say?

Speaker 1:

those timelines are you know, just seeing how the American building codes work. There was just a whole big thing about increasing insulation standards where the industry fought back and the codes weren't upgraded quickly as much as people wanted.

Speaker 2:

The fights over increasing the heights, the amount of wood construction, has taken years, so God, I don't know, a decade decade, which seems like a long time but really isn't In my perspective, especially if you're talking about somebody that's, let's say, a high school grad, goes to college, gets their degree, comes out as a profession. I mean, by the time that they hit their first firm in the building industry, they're already halfway to that mark, right? So if you're not talking about and getting the skills and information to address this, you're going to be behind the power curve in a decade.

Speaker 1:

Well, I think that's why I hated being an architect, because everything's so damn slow. I don't know.

Speaker 1:

I prefer at least. When I write something, it gets published the same day. When I design something, you'd have to wait years to get it approved and I just didn't have the attention span for it. But we've got to move faster on these things. I just wrote a post today about gas stoves, and this is a total aside, but you know a new study came out saying how bad gas stoves are for your health, that as many as 19,000 Americans are dying per year because of the increase in nitrogen dioxide emissions.

Speaker 1:

Yet look what happened last year. When somebody even breathed the idea that there might be some regulation of gas stoves, the entire Republican Party went off the rails, passed legislation save our gas stoves. One politician had a tweet saying guns, god and gas stoves, as if these are all equally important issues, and obviously nobody legislated anything on gas stoves substance and never will, because the fossil fuel industry wants to keep us hooked up to gas pipes and gas stoves are the only tangible thing that people see. They don't see their furnace or water heater and probably wouldn't care if someone sold them a good heat pump that did the same thing, but they want them to be passionate about their gas stoves. So change just happens so slowly in a politicized environment, and the concrete industry is very, very powerful. If you were going to say one thing every time there is any proposal to increase the height of wood and increase the use of wood as a substitute for concrete, they go nuts, protecting their own interests. So everything takes longer than I think it should because of the vested interests.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I agree. But on the note of using wood in construction and specifically going taller, part of that conversation obviously is mass timber. What are your high-level thoughts on mass timber? And then we'll kind of dive down a couple areas to unpack it level of thoughts on mass timber and then we'll kind of dive down a couple areas to unpack it.

Speaker 1:

Mass timber has a wonderful role to play, I think, and we've got a serious housing crisis, a shortage of housing in North America. We've got a serious problem again with carbon, and all kinds of studies show the most efficient kind of housing from a cost and a carbon point of view is mid-rise housing, the missing middle as it's called. And mass timber is wonderful. So you know, you can use stick framing to what five or six stories, I think in the United States, and then mass timber can very nicely go to five to 50. And that's its sweet spot.

Speaker 1:

I think that there's been so much of oh, we're building the tallest mass timber, the tallest mass timber. Some new building comes out and for the next two weeks it's the tallest mass timber building until the next one comes out. And I think this is ridiculous. The stuff shouldn't. You know we're pushing it too far, too high, too fast, to no real end.

Speaker 1:

Tall buildings are inherently less efficient than short buildings in terms of the mechanical systems. Wood buildings are really light and when they built the one that what was temporarily at 18 stories the tallest one in the world in Norway, they had to pour all of this concrete in the top of it just to hold it from waving in the wind because the stuff's so light. And even Andrew Waugh, who's done more mass timber buildings than anyone in the wind, because the stuff's so light. And even Andrew Waugh, who's done more mass timber buildings than anyone in the world with Waugh-Thistleton, says they shouldn't be more than 15 stories because you're just getting ridiculous.

Speaker 1:

The size of the members are getting huge. The engineering's getting crazy. So I think we should stop this stupid competition to be the tallest one and just figure what is its sweet spot. And its sweet spot is where you're just beyond what you can do with. Stick to where it makes no sense, which is taller than 50. That's what I've learned. Other people may disagree, but that's what I've learned from the experts like Waugh and others who have really looked at the situation.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, it's hard to argue with somebody like him being at the forefront of all of this conversation. What about the production model? So one of the big talking points in the mass timber industry is you're supporting forest health, sustainable forest management, as long as you're sourcing your timber correctly and then going to the mills and local economies and all that kind of stuff. How do you see that conversation playing out?

Speaker 1:

Well, I saw a great project. I was asked to speak at a Passive House conference in Colorado last year and I was moderating a panel where I got to meet the founders of Timber Age. I can't remember his name right now Kyle Hansen yes, kyle Kyle Hansen and I went in there and I was dubious. I thought you know, I don't believe that we should be using mass timber for one and two story buildings and it's a waste of fiber and why would you do this when you've got stick frames? So I went in there ready to rumble and be quite critical, and then I learned what he was really doing. And what he was doing was not like mass timber as I knew it, where you're taking two by fours and two by sixes and pressing them together in expensive factories like what did Katera pay to build their factory when they were back there? $180 million or something.

Speaker 1:

These guys are moving. They're building very small flying factories and they take it to where the wood is. And the wood that they go to is in forests that have been left too long, that are too crowded, too many trees that are on the verge of dying, that really need thinning and really need some proper forest management, and they take those trees that are problematic. They bring their sawmill right to where the trees are. They use smaller wood because those are the trees they're getting out and they create smaller lamellas, the pieces of wood that they glue together. Instead of two by six, they take like almost one by fours and two by threes and whatever they can get out of it and this is I won't call it crap wood, but it's not wood that people would be making mainstream cross-laminated timber out of it and then they glue it all together in God with a vacuum form, with a vacuum press. They don't even build a giant press, they just suck the air out of it and let the atmosphere put it together. So the whole thing costs nothing to build and that the wood they get wouldn't come close to meeting the official international standards for cross-laminated timber in terms of strength and that. And they don't use it that way. They use it for one and two-story buildings, which is golden, for.

Speaker 1:

So what was so brilliant about this were, like five different things all in one thing. They're using wood that really needs to be chopped, so they're improving the force. They're leaving it better than when they came in, they're making it almost entirely local. And then they're taking it and they figure out a way to sort of thicken up the wall and pack in the wood fiber and cellulose insulation and make it to Passive House quality construction and to me I thought, wow, they've made probably the most environmentally sensible thing that we could do, creating local employment and doing it all within this really short range stuff so that the shipping is negligible out of junk wood. So there is an example, I think, to hold a to shine a real light on what they're doing. That's so terrific.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I agree, I'm a big fan. I got a piece of their timber up here, yeah, yeah, and we're doing a coordinated tour thing with them for our conference this summer where some select folks will get to go down there and kind of go through that entire process you just talked about and really kind of educate them on what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and again I went in there ready to crap all over it, thinking you know you shouldn't be doing mass timber for such low rise buildings, and I was just proven so wrong. And I love being proven wrong. It's one of the things that I've learned over the years.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think if more people love being proven wrong, a lot of things could happen a lot faster than they do. I agree Everything that you talked about. With the timber age model. I'm a big fan, like I said, what about on, like, the larger scale buildings that you traditionally see, mass timber and like, like you said, those five-plus stories and maybe commercial or industrial uses? Are you seeing any innovative, unique uses of timber products, like NLT or anything like that?

Speaker 1:

Well, it's funny If you look at the first. You know Heinz is building all their T5 buildings and all of that and their first one was in Minneapolis and Michael Green was the architect, and Michael Green was the architect and Michael Green wanted to build it out of cross-laminated timber, but cross-laminated timber wasn't in the codes yet, whereas nail-laminated timber has been in the codes for 150 years. It's like what every industrial building was always built of. So they decided to make it out of NLT and he was disappointed until it actually got built and he realized how cool this stuff is, that it's got that wonderful warehouse look and that you can do it. And people are doing NLT in their backyards. It's very easy, but some people are doing it really really cleverly.

Speaker 1:

Like Miller Hull, I think, were the architects for the Candida Building, which is a living building challenge, educational building in Atlanta, georgia, and the living building challenge has a lot of different petals, but one of them is that you're supposed to do social good. It promotes recycling of materials and it does promote low-carbon materials. And what they did at the Candida building is that they designed a nail-laminated timber that alternated between a new 2x8, I think it was and then recycled 2x6, so that there's this visual gap on the bottom, this really nice shadow look of it and they hired people who were ex-convicts and trained them how to do all the nailing. So basically, you know, it's not a job that required a huge amount of skill and they basically turned it into a training exercise for these people, giving them jobs that I believe that they're still doing and they're still cranking this stuff out. So what you've got was you've got a material that looked absolutely gorgeous. It is different than just a flat piece of CLT, but there are shadow lines and a real character of it because the two woods are different colors. It does the job of creating the floor slab with a low-carbon material and it put a lot of people who needed jobs to work and that was the kind, I think, innovative thinking that we need.

Speaker 1:

The other interesting one that I saw when I was out in British Columbia was where they industrialized dowel-laminated timber, which is so clever. They basically mass all these drills, drill these holes through all the wood and then they take hardwood broomsticks, essentially that they've kiln-dried all the moisture out of them. They just stick them in the holes, they suck up the moisture from the wood around them, expand and just lock this thing together. And the beauty of it is that if you go and cut nail-laminated timber to try and reuse it, your saw is going to break If you're thinking about the glues or what happens in the reuse of that but a slab of nail laminated timber is going to last forever. And I have a great example of that.

Speaker 1:

When I was an architect and this is talking 35 years ago I was doing a job where we went to cut holes in a floor of a two-story building I was turning them into townhouses and it had been an office and the saw blade broke and we pulled it up, pulled up the plywood to see why and underneath had been a bowling alley which is basically nail-laminated maple.

Speaker 1:

And we hit a nail. So then we very carefully got very expensive blades that could go through nails, cut all of these pieces of wood out and big slabs, and my dining room table is a 35-year-old piece of bowling alley that's made of nail laminated timber that was probably laid down there in 1950. So 70 years later it's still gorgeous.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think something that we haven't quite explored because these buildings are quote unquote relatively new is like what are you going to see on, like the deconstructability for some of these mass timber panels, whether they're CLT, nlt, dlt, all that kind of all the acronyms out there? But I think that that's something that isn't talked about as much because we're not experiencing the end life cycle of these buildings yet. But I think that there's a lot of opportunity to use those types of products, like you said.

Speaker 1:

Oh I.

Speaker 2:

We talked about NLT, we talked about small scale regional forest use and we've talked about the challenges that we've overcome. You know where we think that we need mass timber to be in, like that sweet spot that you talked about five to 15 stories. Where do you see kind of the future of mass timber, the future of upfront carbon discussion going in the next five to 10 years?

Speaker 1:

in the next five to 10 years. This was the issue of. They were so proud about how much wood they were using and how much carbon they were storing, and the mindset has to switch.

Speaker 2:

Where we've come with mass timber, the sweet spot, how people are looking at upfront carbon. Where do you think people are getting the upfront conversation? And maybe even with mass timber, specifically wrong, when are people not quite hitting the right tone, if you will? Well, for years everybody's been talking about wrong. Where are people not quite hitting the right tone, if you will?

Speaker 1:

Well, for years everybody's been talking about how much carbon is sequestered or stored in mass timber. You cut the wood and you make it into the mass timber and a ton of timber is maybe sequestering a ton of carbon. And for a long time people would talk about this as if the more the merrier, the more wood we use, the more carbon we sequester in that. And this always troubled me, this concept of using more stuff. And I even know of an architect who pitched me on their building to write about it, saying we wanted to have big, big 30-foot spans here for flexibility, so we're storing so much carbon and all these giant beams we need to hold up the slabs. And they were proudly discussing how much they were storing and I thought well, wait a minute, wait a minute. That means you're chopping more trees. I understand that we want to use wood instead of other materials, but shouldn't we use it as carefully and as sparingly as we can? And indeed, when I was last in London talking to Andrew Waugh of Waugh Thistleton Architects some of the world's leading architects in wood construction a few years ago, when I met Andrew and said you know, not all of the carbon in the tree gets into the building. Some of it is lost, some of it is left in the roots, some of it is burned to kiln dry. There's transportation. I'm told by experts that only half of the carbon makes it into the building and the rest is lost to the atmosphere. And we said well, we're replanting and we'll just replant two trees, as if this would solve the problem. And that was probably a decade ago.

Speaker 1:

On my last trip when I saw him, we went into his new black and white building which is all made of LVL, laminated veneer lumber, which is very strong, and he proudly was showing me how slim the columns were and the beams and noting that they are now using 40% of the amount of fiber that they used to use in their buildings, when they just were thinking all the time that the more the merrier. And I think this is the major change in attitude. We shouldn't be proud of how much we're storing, because there's always going to be a cost. We have to take into account the slash, the kiln drying, the transportation, and probably the biggest one that's never been properly quantified, I don't think, is what's left when the roots all rot, which they will. What proportion of the tree is under the ground rotting away? We don't know. So this is the big issue.

Speaker 1:

I think that moderation was never something that was being practiced before in people who were using wood construction, and they're beginning to think more about how much are we using, how can we use less? What is the most efficient shape? What is the most efficient grid size? How do we dial back the fiber? So I think that's what's coming. The other thing that's coming is the massive increase in the use I'm hoping to see of wood fiber insulation. We're seeing the new factory that just opened in Maine. Who is it again? I always get the name wrong.

Speaker 2:

Timber HP.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, timber HP, which was started by architects who also started a prefab company called GoLogic, and wood fiber insulation has been common in Europe for a number of years and very expensive to bring over here.

Speaker 1:

And I think it's fantastic because we're doing it, because cellulose insulation is what we've all been using and we're running out of newspaper because all the newspapers are going broke, so there's a limit to how much cellulose insulation we're going to have in the world and the wood fiber insulation is great. I just read a book I was asked to review a book by an English author. It's actually proposing that we should be planting really fast growing trees like willow which isn't good for much else willow, but we should be growing the willow to grab the carbon out of the air. It grows really fast chop it all down, put it through the grinder and turn it into wood fiber, so that we're going to be seeing more and more of use of small wood, of use of. You know, we're getting down to the twigs here when we're making fiber insulation out of it, and I think this is a fabulous trend that we'll be using all of the wood this way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I agree. I think somebody told me once on a podcast, like you want to be responsible and you want to use as little as possible from the forest. The fiber that you do take out of there, you want to make sure that it's put to its highest and best use right, and so if you can put it into a product that's going to go into a building and last a hundred years, it's much better than turning it into, you know, a single use throwaway item. And so I think that these different products, these innovations I don't even know if I would call it innovation necessarily because, like you said, these products have been around for a very long time when you're talking about wood fiber insulation, but the new adoption of pushing them forward, especially over here, is going to really make use of that quote unquote like low value fiber or things that have been wasted in the past. So I like seeing that the efficiency there of not wasting all of the byproducts, if you would, from like traditional lumber stuff.

Speaker 1:

If you see what's happening all through the southeastern United States and now in British Columbia, where forests are being grown and shopped down to be turned into pellets, shipped to England and thrown into former coal-fired power plants. Because someone, when they wrote a study for the IPCC a few years ago, said burning wood is carbon neutral because it's sort of short cycle carbon. I'm sorry, you know we shouldn't be burning this stuff. You know it puts out more carbon per ton of stuff and it's carbon is carbon is carbon when it gets into the atmosphere. So I think it's scandalous and we could be taking all that wood, growing it and we could be turning it into insulation instead.

Speaker 2:

Yeah yeah. Lots of good uses for wood, rather than just turning it into a fire starter. Before I ask my last question where can people connect with you? Where can people find your book?

Speaker 1:

My book is available. Oh, I hate to say it. If you go to newsocietypublisherscom, you can order it online from the publisher. That's the American website. Canadians should go to newsocietypublishersca. The prices, the dollars, change. It is available on that big online company. I don't know if it's in very many bookstores in the United States, yet it's in a few big ones in Canada because New Society is a Canadian publisher. I have my sub stack, which you can just by going lloydaltercom. It will forward you to the sub stack which you can then follow. And I write three times a week and it's free, and I'm occasionally on a podcast called Zero Ambitions and I haven't been on that much lately, but I am there.

Speaker 2:

All right. Well, I'm going to link all of those different places down below so, if people are interested, they can check out your newsletter, your podcast and then, obviously, get a copy of your new book, which I just ordered right before we hopped onto this, by the way. So I'm excited to read it. Wonderful. So last question for you you got somebody in an elevator for 30, 45 seconds. What's the message about upfront carbon that you want them to walk out with? It comes down to two words.

Speaker 1:

I mean, I don't need an elevator. I could do it in two steps of an escalator. Use less stuff. This is what applies to everything Use less stuff and make it last, and these are the things that we have to do in our lives as well as in our architecture.

Speaker 2:

Great message. I love it. Well, thanks for coming on and spending an afternoon with me, Lloyd. I really appreciate your time. Look forward to reading your book and then watching what other articles you come out with on Substack. So thank you for being here.

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Brady Potts

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Nic Wilson

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