A record of the building process

Burning wood still releases carbon — so why call it renewable? An explanation with savings and salaries, plus the three conditions that must hold for the logic to work.

Most criticism of pellets is fair — of some pellets. Under one name there are different things, and the difference is decided in the forest, not the factory.

Why did acacia, the king of Indonesian forestry, fall — and how did eucalyptus take its place? A true story of why we don't bet everything on a single tree.

'The Fairy and the Woodcutter' and 'Jaka Tarub and Nawang Wulan' — from two strikingly similar old tales of Korea and Indonesia, what kind of woodcutter do we mean to be?

With no glue and no chemical binder, how does a wood pellet hold so firm? Crush the wood and it becomes thread; the threads tangle like yarn, and the tree's own substance locks the tangle in place.

Trees that grow without rest for want of winter, generous rain that waters them from the sky, and a road that leads straight to the sea. Why we chose this land.

One kilogram of wood pellets, the weight of a milk carton. We measure the power inside it in phone charges, light bulbs, movies, and electric-car kilometers.

What on earth is carbon, and what does carbon neutrality mean? Starting from the Lego-brick stuff of life, we unpack it all with a single seesaw.

How did wood, the oldest fuel, become a small pellet? An idea from the 1800s, a machine for animal feed, and the 1973 oil crisis meet to give birth to the wood pellet.

You grow the trees abroad but burn them here — so isn't it only my country's air that suffers? By separating carbon from fine dust, we face this old misunderstanding head-on.

How does a power plant make electricity? Likening it to a giant kettle that boils water to spin a turbine, we explain in plain words how a coal plant can switch to wood pellets by changing only the fuel.

Why can carbon build everything? Why a diamond and a pencil lead are the same substance — and why the problem is not carbon itself but which store we take it from.

Firewood leaves a heap of ash, so why does a good wood pellet leave almost none? Why the amount of ash is quality itself — and how even that last handful returns to the soil.