RESPONSE FOR GEEKS ONLY
You're at the very least partially correct, Fred. Many woods are photo-reactive, although most are also oxy-kinetically reactive. There's an excellent paper, co-authored by Ni-Bin Chang*,a, Kuen-Song Lin, b, Y.P. Sun, a, and H.Paul Wang, a, that describes many of these properties in <u>painful</u> detail. It was published in the late 90's as I recall.
a Dep. of Environmental Engineering, National Cheng Kung Univ., Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of China
b Dep. of Chemical Engineering, Wu-feng Institute of Technology, Chia-yi, Taiwan, Republic of China
As I recall, the study was focused on oxidation kinetics of construction and demolition wastes and was considered for a Nobel Prize due to the potential impact on landfills.