Mass timber and engineered wood products (cross-laminated timber, glulam)

Industry is the backbone of modern civilization, but it's also one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Manufacturing steel, cement, chemicals, and plastics doesn't just burn fossil fuels for energy — these processes often require fossil fuels as raw ingredients or release CO2 as an unavoidable part of the chemistry itself.

This creates a massive challenge. We can't simply swap in renewable electricity and call it solved. Heavy industry needs fundamentally different approaches: new chemistries, new materials, new ways of thinking about how we make things. The scale is enormous — industry accounts for about a quarter of global emissions — but so is the opportunity to transform how we build our world.

Every building, road, and bridge embeds enormous amounts of carbon in its materials before construction even begins. Making steel, concrete, aluminum, and glass releases massive amounts of CO2, and transporting heavy materials adds more emissions. This embodied carbon can account for 10-20% of a building's lifetime emissions, even before anyone turns on the lights.

As buildings become more energy-efficient, embodied carbon becomes a bigger share of their total impact. The construction industry is enormous — concrete alone is the most-used material on Earth after water — so changing how we build could dramatically reduce global emissions.

These products use wood as a structural material for large buildings, replacing steel and concrete. Cross-laminated timber and glue-laminated timber are engineered to be incredibly strong while storing carbon that trees absorbed from the atmosphere. Mass timber buildings can be built faster than concrete and steel, and the wood continues to store carbon for the building's lifetime. The challenge is scaling up sustainable forestry and changing building codes to allow taller wood buildings.