Maybe you need to get out more? In France (where I assume you live) new public buildings are mandated to be at least 50% wood or other bio-based renewables. Also ~5% (and increasing) of new domestic builds are timber framed.
So the 5% French figures in 2025 confirm my impression. Most stuff are not made of wood in France.
Maybe it’s a language thing : when I say « made of wood » I mean that no stone are involved. There is no percentage. The whole frame is 2 by 4 from Home Depot.
(Concrete isn't, but plain old stone? Or bricks?)
You can recycle them. And raw stones are not a rare thing and they do get formed new constantly inside the earth.
I wouldn't call that marginal. And vulcanoes are just the visible part of that process happening everywhere in the crust.
Some rate of formation is not enough to satisfy the commonly held definition of renewable resources. Google "is stone a renewable resource" for a jumping off point.
Sure, it doesn't fit the definition, but there is also no reason to care that it doesn't.
Likewise, there's nothing renewable about stone. Our primary source is digging it out of the ground.
That isn't renewable in the timeframe of humanity, but in the age of the universe it's renewable.
Yes, of course, stone doesn’t really grow back on the timescales that we care about. Yes, stone not “bio” in any sense really.
But the goal of the law is not to make biology or geology points. It is to reduce the embodied carbon of new construction. I guess the determination was made that stone has some carbon cost… maybe it comes from the mining?
Or maybe they are trying to kickstart, specifically, a new industry in the field of growable construction material. Maybe they figure stone mining is already well developed tech anyway.
Lots of house in France are made of that. Not “rocks” and that is a co2 intensive process to produce concrete.
See : Lafarge
We have concrete buildings going back to Greek and Roman times, mostly standing.
Wooden buildings have a very finite lifespan, and, aside from earthquakes, much less so in a disaster. A wooden city and a steel/brick/concrete city react very differently to firebombing.
Especially with declining populations, it makes sense to build structures to last. The old school brick/concrete/stone/... European buildings from 1500 are largely in good shape, at least where they weren't demolished by war.
Traditional European construction is also much more friendly for heating / cooling. The thermal capacity of stone-based materials helps a lot.
To me, it feels a bit like Germany banning nuclear power plants, and switching to Russian fossil fuels instead...
That is woke bs and you know it. If it ain't 100% roman concrete, it ain't right.
It will be relatively similar to most other major European cities; solid masonry construction has historically been the norm.
You'll find some wooden houses in smaller towns and rural areas, but even there, if you head over to e.g. Poland, most things will be solid masonry. And the wooden construction is mostly relatively new; what you'll rarely find is old wooden construction.
I live in the northern part of Central Europe and have spent over a decade travelling through these countries. Ive worked with log and timber frame construction and have a solid understanding of traditional and modern building methods. I know how buildings are actually made, not just how they look on googles street view...
In Sweden around 80% of standing homes are wooden. About 90% of new single-family homes are timber construction. Gothenburg is an outlier because of 19th-century laws that limited wooden buildings to two storeys, which is why you get the Landshövdingehus with a brick base and wooden upper floors.
The Netherlands is western Europe, not northern or central. That’s basic geography...
Timber is the dominant material in residential construction across Sweden, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Denmark is more mixed, and Poland leans more towards masonry, but the south has a strong timber tradition, especially in the Tatra region.
And even in places like Germany or Denmark where it looks like brick, it's often just a clinker façade over a timber or frame structure. It’s aesthetic, not structural.
Honestly, it's laughable to compare the dense inner city to the massive volume of buildings outside it. You're looking at a fraction and pretending it's the whole. It’s just not serious.
What is "very finite" here? Where I grew up there are wood houses/barns/structures made entirely out of wood and still standing/being used after hundreds of years. Is that not enough?