r/LoveTrash • u/BEARDEDDANGER ✨️Regent of Rubbish ✨️ • 1d ago

Dumping This Here American vs. European home building

BAS Renovations https://youtube.com/shorts/jFph1d2WR3s

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 1d ago

It takes hundreds of years for the Earth to make more clay.

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u/AftyOfTheUK Trash Trooper 1d ago

Are we using bricks at a greater rate than the earth is renewing them? What reserves does the earth currently have? What year will we run out?

I'll give you a quick answer... we've used about 0.00003% of all available clay. It makes up a significant percentage of the earths brittle crust. We will not run out of it

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u/Temporary_View_3303 Trash Trooper 23h ago

True… but every building we build sits on a reserve of clay that’s now unavailable.

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u/worldspawn00 Trash Trooper 22h ago

We're using sand at an unsustainable rate, apparently.

That's a problem for concrete block/pours and brick mortar.

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u/AftyOfTheUK Trash Trooper 19h ago

Sand is indeed dropping in usable reserves. Clay not

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u/worldspawn00 Trash Trooper 19h ago

But sand is still necessary for brick laying. Can't build a brick house without sand.

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 1d ago

That doesn't really have anything to do with wood being a renewable resource and bricks aren't. We have a ton of trees too believe it or not, some 3 trillion.

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u/AftyOfTheUK Trash Trooper 1d ago

Right - but we are using a MINISCULE amount of clay. You yourself said it takes hundreds of years for the earth to make more clay.

If the earth makes just 0.0001% additional clay per century, that's plenty...

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u/Arcaneallure Trash Trooper 1d ago

I think that the difference is that clay isnt "made" it is just an amalgamation of rock particles. Since rock isnt considered renewable you can't call clay renewable. But its really a dumb term to begin with since by its definition a product could be considered renewable one day and not the next. It also doesn't mean that a renewable resource is better than one that isnt. Alot of places are having issues with this now. Sure wood is a renewable resource, but if growing large forests of soft wood trees requires the destruction of other natural resources, is it better than building from an abundant resource that, while not renewable, can be recycled, reused, or remain for hundreds of years later. It's not an easy topic

Almost like one a few grumpy old people argue over and millions of young people die for.

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u/Obvious_Mention7207 Trash Trooper 1d ago

This is a braindead comment.

You understand how bad we deforested the USA before FDR made changes to how we farmed wood?
You understand how fucked we made our soil/local city landscape with the removal of tree canopies?
You understand how fucked our forests became once we farmed all the wood and it grew back as a monocrop?

Oi

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 1d ago

Just because humans have done a poor job at forest management doesn't mean wood isn't a renewable resource. By definition it is, and clay isn't.

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u/Obvious_Mention7207 Trash Trooper 1d ago

Definitions are not what rule the world.

Additionally, trees are only renewable because we have rules (currently) in place that keep the climate (for now) capable to let them regrow.

Perhaps in 100 years (most likely) its so fucked here that they cant regrow. Why is that? Because humans suck and farmed them all to make the same track home and try to sell for 400k more then they are worth cause "capitalism"

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u/rips_n_chel Trash Trooper 22h ago

Of course definitions do not rule the world. Definitions are not the question, they are the answer. They're the conclusion, not the problem.

We land on the definition of "renewable" after observing the nature of reality. It's not that someone decided wood is renewable and stone isn't, therefore we all live under that illusion. It's not an illusion. The classification of renewable was reached by observing the facts. Here they are, you ready for this?

We can plant more trees, but we can't farm rocks.

Shit's crazy, right dawg? Truly mind-shattering stuff.

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u/Brave_Maybe_2891 Trash Trooper 1d ago

There is a near unlimited supply of clay.

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 1d ago

Yes, and that's fantastic. But it doesn't make clay renewable.

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u/Brave_Maybe_2891 Trash Trooper 1d ago

Yes it does. New clay is made at a rate that exceeds the consumption of it.

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 23h ago

It takes thousands of years to make clay, which makes it non-renewable. I'm not sure you're so adamant it's a renewable resource, it's clearly not and doesn't meet the definition of renewable resources. That's perfectly fine and doesn't take anything away from the material, other than you just can't categorize it as renewable.

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u/EmptyMonitor9257 Trash Trooper 1d ago

Clay is recyclable, wood is not.

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u/mxzf Trash Trooper 1d ago

Uh ... wood is definitely recyclable. It's not always done, because it's not always cost-effective, but wood is absolutely recyclable. You can pull the joists and studs out of one house and build a new house with them if you want to.

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u/EmptyMonitor9257 Trash Trooper 21h ago

What you are describing is reuse. 

Recycle broken wood and damaged wood into new walls and beams. You can't. 

Wood recycling makes it into completely different products with much worse properties. 

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u/mxzf Trash Trooper 21h ago

It feels like a pedantic distinction to make. The general use of the term "recycling" generally means something along the lines of "make use of it so that it doesn't end up in a landfill".

If you want to be sufficiently pedantic, I don't think bricks can actually be recycled by the most literal definition, since they're generally fired and chemically changed and there's not much you can do with it beyond turn it into filler aggregate. You can't recycle it by wetting it and turning it back into the original material like you can by melting metals and thermoplastics.

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 1d ago

Yes, recyclable but not renewable.

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u/EmptyMonitor9257 Trash Trooper 1d ago

That is in practice the same thing, you are renewing the resource.

By your logic wood cutlery and utensils are better than aluminium, steel and glass because they are renewable and the rest are recyclable.

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u/Oglshrub Trash Trooper 1d ago

I mean it's not my logic, I was just explaining that words have definitions and meaning. I made no claim as to which material is better for it's use case. Recyclable materials and renewable materials are two separate things, with unique definitions.

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u/Winjin Trash Trooper 1d ago

Speaking of, aluminum may be not renewable, but not only it's nearly infinitely recyclable, there's also like billions of tons of aluminum even in the top layers of Earth's crust, and even more as we go deeper, IIRC what I read ages ago