Articles on some of the different facets of making a sustainable building
Bat-safe roofs
Sustainable building isn't all about carbon reduction (though that is essential!) but also about supporting biodiversity. It's crucial to maintain and increase habitat for other species. Bats often lose out when new roofs are designed
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.
Embodied Carbon - what is it and how to compare materials? Sustainable building materials, Part 4
Sustainable building must mean producing as little CO₂ as possible. That means low or zero carbon emissions from both construction and use of a building. Choices of material can have a huge impact on this.
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.
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?