Ahoy gents..  

This is a fascinating issue...
This is a fascinating issue to me, though I'm in over my head. Why don't we use milkweed for our paper already? There must be some economic disadvantage, it would seem to me. Any idea what that is, exactly? Do trees yeild a higher volume of pulp per planted acre? As for my comment about the trees, I only meant to answer to koen that the trees that get made into kraft paper are not the same trees that get used for their lumber, I'd guess. If the lumber trees grew as fast as the kraft paper trees, then maybe it would be silly to grind them into pulp and make kraft paper, easy edges, etc..

Although I live north of a large papermill...
... and south of the woods that provide them with raw material, and although I wonder, each time I drive in the vicinity of the mill how people can live in the awfull odours that are spread by the mill, I still rejoys in the existence of both Frank Gehry's furniture and Shigeru Ban's feather light buildings...or structures. I have nothing agains experimenting quite the contrary, but it has been published, we have seen it and that should be the end of it. These are experiments so let's not confuse them with solutions, because they are not.

...and when talking about wood....
let's make a difference between growing trees in a productiv and efficient way and cutting old forests where indeed, part of the wood can not be used for timber or furniture.

Arup's eco-cites?
Thank you for providing a dissenting voice to what I might otherwise take to be unanimous approval of Ban's work. I'll definitely have to look further into this issue myself in order to know where I stand. It's too bad, I had wanted to believe that a fine solution had been found. It looks more and more like humanity is coming to a dead end. No solutions seem to be nearly of so great a scale as the mess we've made of our environment. Anybody know where I can learn more about Arup's eco-cities in China? (Aiming for zero carbon emissions - that's good, because there's an underground coal fire in China that emits as much greenhouse gasses every year as all the cars in the USA - and NOBODY can put the fire out - and it'll burn for another century at least. And the scientific community tells us that if we stop producing CO2 right NOW, the consequences will STILL be very dire. But of course, we can't stop now, or billions of us will die. And global oil demand is only rising at an unprecedented rate. ..somebody pass me a bottle..)

& dipshit Bush only has his head up his ass
..which is in a nose-dive of its own. Sorry. Anger to combat despair.