Click here for a song about band aid solutions – the Big Rock Candy Mountain

Consider this problem: Every time we put a wooden post or other structure into the ground, or even near soil, some damned microbes start in eating it and in a few years it rots and falls apart. WHAT CAN WE DO????

FIRST GENERATION IDEA: In accord with Western concepts of always dominating every situation, KILL THE LOUSY BUGGERS!!! Fill the wood with pesticides (like green copper chromium arsenate) so that any microbes that get near the wood WILL PERISH!

PROBLEM:
The poison is a poison for us too, as well as everything else that lives. Some of the treated wood has been used on playgrounds so our children are touching it too. So pull it out and throw it away – excuse me, recycle it. But how do you recycle poisoned wood? All very confusing. (Zero Waste thinking provides simple, commonsense ways to reuse the wood but who wants to listen to that?)

There are always a few people who are not impressed with first ideas. One of them came up with a SECOND GENERATION IDEA.

Instead of killing the microbes, how about changing the wood, in a non-poisonous way, so that the microbes can’t find a place to start chewing? It works with polyethylene, so why not with wood? He found out that microbes start to chew on the tasty HYDROXYL GROUPS that stick out all over the wood molecules. So what happens if we cover up all of those hydroxyl groups by reacting them with ACETYL GROUPS. Thus the Accsys Corporation was born. This company is treating wood with a very concentrated acetic acid, known as acetic anhydride, to tie up the free hydroxyl groups and make them unpalatable. In the process, they claim that the wood becomes so hard that softwoods become hardwoods.

Will there be problems with the second generation idea? Of course it’s possible. We may need to go to a third generation idea. But the first generation idea is now lost in the dust.