…A 24 mile long bridge? Why not! Most large scale engineering projects have a number of competing requirements to solve for when choosing a building or fill material. Project budgets should be affordable, materials should be readily available, labor costs should be minimized, and substrate should be stable and unlikely to decay. With its light weight (11 to 45 kg per cubic meter), ease of installation, and stability, geofoam checks a whole bunch of these boxes. At Maggie Daley Park, one of the…

As a civilization, we deserve what’s coming for us.

…ong as you don’t set it on fire (flame retardant chemicals used to treat geofoam were shown to be accumulating in the ground, which led to their discontinuation in Europe but not the US) or pour a petroleum solvent on i…

I am screaming endlessly.

…res and architectural whimsies. Concrete, rebar, and other building materials also have massive footprints and contribute to a range of complex ecological problems. Geofoam’s artificiality is in no way unique. It’s just visually striking, and thus a useful lens for think…

I don’t think this is fair. Sure, plenty of the chemicals they treat wood with are horrible. But humans can build things out of wood that don’t involve those chemicals. They used to. Is it the “artificiality” that horrifies, is it that it’s “visually striking”, or is it the sense that plastics are more toxic? Is that sense wrong? How does it compare to e.g. the coating of epoxy that goes on rebar?