Articles on some of the different facets of making a sustainable building
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).
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?