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A Chemical Bath and a Hot-press Can Transform Wood Into a Material That is Stronger Than Steel, Researchers Find (nature.com)
The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings, Nature reported this week. From the report: "It's a new class of materials with great potential," says Li Teng, a mechanics specialist at the University of Maryland in College Park and a co-author of the study published on 7 February in Nature. Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades. Some efforts have focused on synthesizing new materials by extracting the nanofibres in cellulose -- the hard natural polymer in the tubular cells that funnel water through plant tissue. Li's team took a different approach: the researchers focused on modifying the porous structure of natural wood. First, they boiled different wood types, including oak, in a solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite for seven hours. That treatment left the starchy cellulose mostly intact, but created more hollow space in the wood structure by removing some of the surrounding compounds. These included lignin, a polymer that binds the cellulose. Then the team pressed the block -- like a panini sandwich -- at 100C (212F) for a day. The result: a wooden plank one-fifth the thickness, but three times the density of natural wood -- and 11.5 times stronger. Previous attempts to densify wood have improved the strength by a factor of about three to four.
Trabants were partially made of plywood, weren't they?
You just invented plywood!
This oughta make something awesome possible. From enclosures to cones. I'm betting this stuff is hell on a skilsaw.....
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
Hm?
How resistant is this to all the ravages of wood?
I mean, it beats the hell out of digging holes in the desert, wouldn't you agree?
There is also a summary here at Sciences News.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
This piece of wood looks extremely dangerous, and may attack at any time, so we must deal with it.
From the summary:
The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings, Nature reported this week. From the report:
There's a reason that we don't build cars and buildings (and other things that need flex) from brittle substances.
One can only hope it doesn't become a delicacy for rodents....
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/honda-s-soy-based-wiring-covers-irresistible-rodents-lawsuit-n504746
Generally solid wood is a good choice for many projects due to three key reasons:
1. Cost
2. Workability; can be worked with hand tools and power tools, glues easily and strong
3. Water safe for years with no significant prep work
Steel is a lot stronger per pound, but to join it you either need to use mechanical fasteners or weld it. This requires expensive ($300+) specialized equipment like a welder and/or drill press. Wooden boats are generally good from 15-20 years without major renovations, and are serviceable with major repairs every 10-15 years up to 60-75 years after initial construction. Steel needs to be galvanized, or painted, or sanded and resurfaced every 2-5 years, especially in a saltwater environment (most of the things in your house arrived from asia in a big steel boat).
Super dense wood that's lost most of it's lignin likely is hyper brittle and doesn't machine well. Also, I can only imagine what happens when it's immersed in water. There's a non-zero chance it swells up like a dry sponge when it comes in contact with water or even regular humidity.
moox. for a new generation.
TFS says:
> Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades.
Decades? Really? People have been firing wood and embedding carbon into its surfaces for at least 400,000 years. This author is off by at least four orders of magnitude.
Whats the energy cost vs other materials ?
Waste treatment ?, what are the by products, how do we dispose of them properly ?
Recycling of the finished product ?
Long term stability over time at different temperatures
How strong is it versus its weight? I skimmed TFA but didn't find a mention of that. This page suggests oak, at 3x normal density, would have comparable density to aluminum. If this material is as strong as steel but as light as aluminum, that could have actual applications. I'd wonder about flammability and rotting, though. Skyscrapers or spaceships made out of wood would be pretty funny, though.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
There's a reason that we don't build cars and buildings (and other things that need flex) from brittle substances.
Termites?
Is artificially advance the conversion of wood into 'fossilized wood'.
Having said that: With the right epoxy or extremely thin superglue compound, it might be possible to take this final material and turn into into an extremely strong lamination layer for some more advanced composite material.
The USSR built the LaGG-3 fighter aircraft from chemically treated/strengthened wood. The resulting aircraft was heavier than using aluminum but shortages require improvisation. Not the best fighter of the war..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Goudkov_LaGG-3
An interesting point is fire resistance, which can be better for wood than for steel. When heated by a fire, steel bends and structure collapse. That does not happen for wood.
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Meanwhile, metals and generally crystals and materials made from ore are easily recycled in a single day, with some smelting and forging, using only solar energy from places where nothing lives anyway.
"Stronger than steel" is silly anyway. Steel is not very strong. And what do you mean with that word anyway? There's half dozen things that that can mean, and in none is steel quite the best we have. Steel is only popular, because it is very abundant and very cheap, with acceptable properties.
Using trees for building things (apart from decorative furniture and the likes) is as stupid as using fields to grow crops to then turn them into gasoline instead of food.
More than likely is a blogger, and not a journalist. Or a scientist.
lets make sure the QA teams test to see if rodents love the taste of it or not this time around please.
It was a minor oversight when they switched to Eco-Friendly wire insulation and became an expensive :|
problem once the rodents learned how amazing it tasted
You are still implying fossil fuel plants and working around the clock/year.
But most metals, aluminium especially, need nothing more than heat (e.g. via electricity). Th process does not need a special site. Or time. Or anything. So the energy can come entirely from he sun, whenever and wherever the sun is available. (Like doing it close to the equator, twice the amount during the day and nothing during the night.)
Which makes it practically free!
Without waiting literally decades for you nasty monoculture of trees to grow in slow-motion, from carbon from burnt trees, taken from the air.
Becaue that is what recycling wood essentially comes down to.
It sounds like a modified recipe for Masonite (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonite)
Then the team pressed the block -- like a panini sandwich -- at 100C
People who read news for nerds might not be able understand what pressing a block means in this context. A highly accurate and technical description, make it so readily comprehensible. Like a panini sandwich! Good, someone might mistake pressed the block something like a burger or a calzone. One might even be thinking of pasta or pilaf or masala dosa. Now it is clear. Press the block like a panini sandwich. Good. Great job.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because if your metal goes in the trash, it doesn't come back. The wood doesn't have to be transported or stored in any special way to be renewed.
Even more stupid, at least in the short term, but in the long term, this might actually make sense (whereas ethanol as a fuel will never make sense).
Imagine this world a few thousand years from now. We've run out of metals suitable for building things, because they're all in use for something. If you want to build a new building, you have to tear one down first, because there's no steel left to make the girders. Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Because if your metal goes in the trash, it doesn't come back.
Can you explain this? It's not like you click on "empty trashcan" and the metal is deleted. That trash is taken somewhere and emptied into something. It doesn't vanish. It can come back.
> Imagine this world a few thousand years from now.
It has no people. Ergo no demand for steel.
Note that "strength" in this context is per cross sectional area. So taking a block of wood, and compressing it down doesn't change its absolute strength (it can support the same weight as before), but increases its measured strength (load per square mm of cross sectional area before failure). One of the attractions of metals like steel is their isotropic properties - they have the same properties regardless of which direction you load them. Fibrous materials are anisotropic - stronger in certain directions than others.
Glass fibers are also stronger than steel in tension, but they're weaker in compression and absolutely suck in shear (loading perpendicular to the fibers). The fibers just bend sideways instead of offering any resistance. So we embed them in a matrix of plastic (polyester or epoxy) to create fiberglass. Tensile and compressive strength are reduced, but shear strength improves substantially - enough to where you can walk on a fiberglass board whereas raw glass fibers would simply flop over and let you fall through. Where a fiber used to bend, the plastic matrix absorbs and transmits those forces to other fibers, converting shear forces into tension and compression (the board bows downward in the middle, compressing in the top half, stretching in the bottom half).
It sounds like what this team has done is taken wood, and cooked it so the cellulose fibers remain but much of the matrix which holds them together has been removed. That has little consequence in tension, but could weaken shear strength to where the material is structurally useless except as rope/cable.
It would be interesting to find an ancient wood armor which have been hardened with a similar technique. Maybe those Chinese desert caves along the silk road or similar places could provide some intact samples. This process sounds like it would be feasible with enough people to manage and wood to burn.
It'd be interesting to see what comes out of this process if they'd used a [real hardwood](http://www.wood-database.com/australian-buloke/)
MC: What is the State Tree of California?
Paul Lynde: Plywood.
It has no people.
That would be enough of an improvement as to make absence of steel even better.
In some places landfill mining is already being done, but with an eye to reducing the volume of existing waste so that new waste can be added. (Planners have a hell of time finding good sites for a landfill even before the NIMBY crowd get involved.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
Imagine this world a few thousand years from now. We've run out of metals suitable for building things, because they're all in use for something.
The Earth's crust is 8% aluminum, 5% iron, 2% magnesium, 0.5% titanium by weight. If we need more of any of this stuff to build a building then we can just dig deeper. Dig deep enough and we'll hit an iron and nickel core.
We are not going to run out of iron, aluminum, and titanium to construct buildings. Not in a million years.
I donâ(TM)t know. I imagine a Dyson sphere requires a LOT of building materials.
By the time we're building a Dyson sphere (or more likely, a Dyson swarm), we should be able to cannibalize the planet Mercury. It's basically just an iron-nickel core with most of the rock blasted away.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
How 'bout a baseball bat made with this process? Could you make a bat that is the same strength or stronger than a regular wooden bat but lighter? Would that be legal for the game?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Good luck digging that deeply, unless you remove the moon, move our entire planet away from the sun a few AUs, and wait billions of years for the radioactive material inside to fully decay so that the core won't be so hot. :-)
If you assume that materials are distributed evenly, then you're right that we won't every truly run out, but that isn't a realistic model. Ores come in veins, separated by miles and miles of crap. At some point, we will exhaust the veins near the surface, and then the cost of mining will go up considerably. For iron, that might never happen, because it is really, really common, but for other components of steel (e.g. chromium, which makes up 16% to 26% of stainless steel by volume), it seems a lot more plausible. Whether that will happen in a thousand years or ten thousand, I couldn't begin to guess; that was an entirely arbitrary number. The point is that eventually, some important raw materials used in making construction materials will be deep enough that other alternatives will start to make sense.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
By the time we're building a Dyson sphere
Out of what, wood? This material sounds like just the thing...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Density or strength (to whatever type of stress) are very relevant features for certain kind of materials, but somehow secondary when thinking about replacing steels or plastics. If you want a strong material regardless of any other thing, you would use something like cement rather than steel. Steels and plastics are strong, but also easily deformable.
On the other hand, there are some scenarios where flexibility doesn't matter much and steel is used anyway; also "stronger than steel" seems a quite catchy headline to get some attention. In any case, using that material to build something like a car seems a quite unlikely scenario because wood is intrinsically brittle.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
You are making assumptions that has nothing to do with how "modern" forest based economies work.
We don't cut down old forests to replace them with some fast-growers. The natural ecosystems and the wood industry are kept separate. (Yes, the industrial woods have their own ecosystems but that is a completely different and interesting subject.)
The old forests and the production forests are separate. We have been growing industrial forests for over a century.
It takes about 30 years (Depending on type of wood.) from plantation until you can harvest a field so you keep a schedule where you have fields you can harvest and field you can replant every year.
A writer of SF stories who does not know from what our planet is composed ...
Uh, oh!
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, wood chips and glue are called waferboard or chipboard.
That is called Oriented Strand Board (or OSB for short) here in the US. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone use the terms waferboard or chipboard on this side of the pond.
How is killing trees more eco-friendly, than just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
Because by growing trees, cutting them down, making them into stuff, and growing more trees, you remove carbon from the atmosphere and fix it in stuff. That alleviates the greenhouse effect.
Note that this is nothing whatsoever to do with biodiversity and complex ecosystems, which you mention briefly. It's just about stabilising the climate.
A Chemical Bath and a Hot-press Can Transform Wood Into a Material That is Stronger Than Steel, Researchers Find
Why pay $15 a pill when you can just immerse in a bath of our special salts?
Warning: If you experience "steel" for longer than a few hot presses, contact your chemist immediately.
Wood will be impregnated, but does not prevent pregnancy.
May cause blue vision.
Generally solid wood is a good choice for many projects due to three key reasons:
1. Cost
2. Workability; can be worked with hand tools and power tools, glues easily and strong
3. Water safe for years with no significant prep work
Whether solid wood is cost effective depends on the application. Sometimes it's a great choice, other times there are better choices. As for workability, again it depends on what you are trying to build. As for water safe, it depends HEAVILY on what you are doing with it. I'm not about to dunk a piece of raw pine in a lake if you get what I'm saying. Most wood of any type requires some sort of coating or treatment to withstand water and remain in good condition for many years.
Steel is a lot stronger per pound, but to join it you either need to use mechanical fasteners or weld it.
??? How many wooden structures have you seen that don't use mechanical fasteners? And wooden objects like furniture that don't use fasteners use glue instead which is comparable to welding in cost and labor for many applications.
This requires expensive ($300+) specialized equipment like a welder and/or drill press.
You have a weird definition of "specialized equipment". You think $300 for a tool is expensive? You can get a drill press for less than $100 from Harbor Freight and a drill press is definitely NOT "specialized equipment". Welding is cheap and it's not something super specialized. I own a stick welding box that costs less than the price any of my nail guns. You can spend a lot on welding gear but people who do that can easily justify the cost.
Wooden boats are generally good from 15-20 years without major renovations, and are serviceable with major repairs every 10-15 years up to 60-75 years after initial construction.
Have you ever actually maintained a wooden boat? I have and they are a HUGE pain in the ass requiring a lot of upkeep every year even if you aren't doing major repairs. My family has two wooden boats and some years we don't even put them in the water because they are such a hassle. We just use the aluminum and composite hulled boats instead. Not saying that they don't have their charms and they do work well when properly maintained but I get why very few people want to bother with wooden boats these days. Composite or aluminum is FAR less hassle under most circumstances.
Steel needs to be galvanized, or painted, or sanded and resurfaced every 2-5 years, especially in a saltwater environment (most of the things in your house arrived from asia in a big steel boat).
Wooden boats need annual work and lots of it if you want them to last. Most boats do not use much steel outside of commercial and military applications.
.. and see what would happen to the wood after it's treated like this?
And it's longer and stronger and harder than anyone others!
how can you compress something to 1/5 its size but only increase its density by 3x? Wouldnt it be 5x by default? D= m/v
FYI, strength is actually a very specific term in engineering. There are many, many different alloys of steel so when you say "steel is not very strong" you are basically saying nothing. Are you only talking about plain steel? I mean, 316SS and AL6061 have the same yield strength. Grade 8 steel is as strong as high strength Ti. Steel is used in buildings because of a balance of material properties, design specifications and cost. Wood is used in pretty much all residential home constructions, so I'm not sure where you get this idea that wood should only be used for decorative furniture... This work would be useful in engineered beams for hold construction and renovation where cost and weight is the driving factor.
Poplars grow straight and 50 feet tall in 3 years sometimes.
We really need to regulate tree farms. There's a lot of cutting of useless forests down in Florida and Virginia--the wood is bent and hollow, no good for anything--and they pretty much use a poorly-written law to get government subsidies for treating the entire natural wetland as "waste product", selling biomass pellets to Europe, and replanting with pine. We should have Federal laws and regulators to ensure logging restores the original habitat (by cutting in patterns to allow natural fill-in) and require permits for tree farming (to avoid converting biodiverse American jungle into giant one-species pine forests).
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At some point, we will exhaust the veins near the surface, and then the cost of mining will go up considerably. For iron, that might never happen, because it is really, really common,
Isn't this some kind of sci-fi trope? I'm struggling to come up with examples, though. Maybe the reason we don't see signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy trying to be heard isn't just that it's staggeringly difficult to pick up such a signal, but also that civilizations dig up their easily-acquired iron and coal, rise and fall, and make it too difficult for subsequent generations to achieve higher levels of technology as their civilizations collapse into detritus and rust away.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A sort of red-haired mirror-image of this process is used to make Rayon.
Odd nobody thought of this earlier.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Plywood is weaker than normal wood not stronger and definitely not stronger than steel.
Any statement about the strength of plywood with respect to ordinary wood is meaningless unless you also are specific about the grain direction and specific stresses it will be subjected to as well as which type of ordinary wood and plywood we are comparing. There are advantages to each and you can find specific situations where each has a performance advantage. While your statement is correct for a wide number of circumstances it is not universally correct.
just recycling an infinitely renewable inorganic compound or metal?
I never followed that "logic".
Trees grow ridiculously slowly. And no, you can't just plant a few fast-growers (in a mono-culture even) and call it the same as an ancient complex forest eco system that sustained tens of thousands of species in an elegant balance of cycles!
Carbon also gets locked up in trees... whilst trees grow, that's carbon out of the atmosphere. Where wood is used to build houses (that's carbon out of the atmosphere)... Yes, obviously it takes burning fuel to build those houses and prep that wood... but it takes even more with steel.
Trees may grow slowly, but that's all for the best- they provide a habitant for wildlife whilst they grow (regrettably mono-culture isn't the best for wildlife), This also means you need more hectares to get enough for building. Here in the US, we stupidly subsidize maize (but not other fruits and veg to the same extent)- even though maize is one of the least healthy foods you can get and adds to the obesity epidemic. (we're using tax money subsidies to make ourselves fat).... but that's a topic for another day.
Wouldn't it be better if instead of so many fields filled with maize we had trees growing on a lot of it instead? Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Mining asteroids to get more iron is, of course, an option, albeit an expensive one. But for a cheaper alternative, we could plant fast-growing trees and make up for the lower density of the soft wood by using a process like this to turn it into something stronger.
Give it 100 years we will have microbes creating wood planks for us that are stronger than any that trees produce now and maybe stronger than steel. Much cheaper than mining asteroids, and in reality we're probably closer to being able to do that than we are to be able to mine asteroids in any economically feasible fashion.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
When wood is thrown out and buried in a landfill, best case, it stays there forever and we just sequestered some carbon!
Good luck digging that deeply, unless you remove the moon, move our entire planet away from the sun a few AUs, and wait billions of years for the radioactive material inside to fully decay so that the core won't be so hot. :-)
Eh... you're over complicating it. Just drill a hole and stick in a straw. If it works for coconuts, it should work for this, right?
Did you know the tree is going to die anyway? Much better to get something valuable out of the trunk than to burn some coal to make some steel.
Dan
I used to work at a copper mine as an engineer. If prices go up, more difficult (read expensive) deposits become economical to mine. In ancient times you could find chunks of 90% metal laying on the surface. That was all picked up a long ago. The mine I worked at was happy with 0.4 - 0.5% copper in the rock. Decrease that and a lot more of the waste rock would be viable to process. Mining of metals is very elastic with price.
Waiting for the earth's core to cool is not the only possibility for mining the core. High temperature materials, and active cooling (read geothermal energy). Certainly not feasible with current technology but it may be possible eventually. Our moon's core is already mostly solid, and it isn't as deeply buried (and with the lower gravity, the pressure down there would be extremely reduced). If we're talking about mining the core, a lunar colony is not further fetched. Fun fact, did you know that gravitation acceleration decreases approximately linearly as you move into a planet. With all forces canceling out in the middle (weightlessness).
I'm well aware of what our planet is composed of. I'm also aware that when you've exhausted the veins of metals that are near the surface, it becomes much, much more difficult to locate additional veins of metal, even though they are there.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Maybe, maybe not. It's an interesting idea, having a bacterium that multiplies, calcifies, and dies (or whatever), but I'm not sure it's really practical. You'd have to be able to provide nutrients to that bacteria, which means it would only be able to grow in a thin layer at a time, and you'd be limited to materials that can readily be transported through cell membranes in some interesting way without killing the bacteria immediately. I'd expect it to end up being orders of magnitude slower than growing trees. Maybe not, but....
You're more likely to be able to genetically engineer a multicellular plant to usefully create such a novel structure than a bacterium, IMO. And then, you're back to trees.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So what? Everything is particle board these days anyway unless you're immorally rich and can afford such things at our expense.
The kindergaeden requirement has been suppressed and replaced, in everyday life, by the beergaeden!
The largest land owner in North Carolina does nothing but grow pine trees. Come out of your Fern Gully fantasy land and realize that trees are grown and harvested like any other cash crop. For the most part, no one is out hunting for an old growth forest raze and build another housing development or make paper. The mills want 1,000 trees a day that are all nearly the same dimensions so that the can set up their machines and let them run. That old growth stuff is all different sizes, with knots all in the wrong places.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth%27s_crust
1) Oxygen
2) Silicon
3) Aluminium
4) Iron
It's fairly straightforward to calculate how much tonnage of wood a given forest generates in a year, and then cut that out. In other words, if a 10 acre forest generates 1 ton of wood, then you cut down 1 ton of trees and replant the patch you cut. Is that 10 acres? of course not. But it is still biodiverse land that requires little active cultivation, and it is more-or-less carbon neutral. (yes, you burn fuel cutting trees and transporting, but you also fix a lot of carbon you don't account for in the growth of other plant life.
More importantly, this is a sustainible system.
Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
A surprising amount of corn is grown entirely or primarily using rainfall as a water source. If the dry parts grow it, then they have to pump water...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
huh huh "wood" huh huh huh
And why/how would mankind exhaust such veins? There will most likely never be many 'full steel' buildings ... same for other metals.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Prettier, more environmentally conscious (at least in areas that would naturally be woodlands)- the dry parts of the Midwest can still grow maize for all I care.
A surprising amount of corn is grown entirely or primarily using rainfall as a water source. If the dry parts grow it, then they have to pump water...
Grass related plants tend to do better with low water than forested areas do. Dry areas tend to be natural grasslands and areas with more rainfall tend to be natural woodlands. Maize being a grass is more suited to low rainfall than woodlands would be. My point being, I don't think we should be foresting natural grasslands, but if an area can naturally sustain trees, that might be a better "crop". If you can't guess- I'm strongly against the subsidization of maize.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
So we discovered yet another reason to cut down trees ? Wood is a very usefull stuff - especially in the form of live trees ! We are cutting far too many of those these days. Yes, I know, I'm a demented conservationist, nature activist etc.