Articles on some of the different facets of making a sustainable building

Straw EPD - quantifying the environmental impacts of straw production

Straw EPD - quantifying the environmental impacts of straw production

In October last year an Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) was published for Straw as Insulation Material in the UK. This was the culmination of months of research and discussions, funded and led by The School of Natural Building and the European Interreg-funded project Up Straw project.

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Life Cycle Assessment, Part 3: Relative proportion of embodied and operational carbon

Life Cycle Assessment, Part 3: Relative proportion of embodied and operational carbon

This post is a somewhat belated follow up to the last three posts, which looked at embodied carbon of building materials, introduced whole-building life cycle assessment (LCA), and finally explained LCA further with a worked example. A key point from those blogs was that it was essential to look at the emissions and energy use of a building over it’s entire life span

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Life Cycle Assessment, Part 2: example carbon assessment for a Passivhaus building.

Life Cycle Assessment, Part 2: example carbon assessment for a Passivhaus building.

This post follows directly from the last two, which looked at ways to compare the embodied carbon of different materials. This post puts that into practice with an example using life cycle assessment to compare the differing carbon impacts of different options for a passivhaus design.

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How insulating is strawbale? Sustainable building materials Part 3 - revised

How insulating is strawbale? Sustainable building materials Part 3 - revised

Knowing the thermal conductivity of any material you build with is essential. Without it you can’t calculate the energy balance of any building or do any kind of heat flow calculations, from simple U value calculations to complex thermal bridging assessment.

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What does 'sustainable' mean? Sustainable building materials, Part 2

What does 'sustainable' mean? Sustainable building materials, Part 2

In the last blog I talked about the term ‘natural’ in relation to buildings and sustainability, concluding that it was unhelpful at best, as it doesn’t really tell us anything about a product’s provenance, sustainability, or even level of processing (e.g. wood-fibre board and strawbale and are both described as ‘natural materials’ but neither would exist in their useful form without mechanised human intervention).

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Natural vs Sustainable - Sustainable building materials, Part 1

Natural vs Sustainable - Sustainable building materials, Part 1

The word ‘natural’ is often used as shorthand for ‘sustainable’ - but should it be? Is a natural building material automatically sustainable, and are the only sustainable materials natural ones? What does the word ‘natural’ really mean anyway? Come to that, what does the word ‘sustainable’ really mean?

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