NATURAL BUILDING MATERIALS 1.5
Environmental Aspect :
Why build and we furnish homes with natural materials and how this helps protect our common home-nature?
The construction consumes 40 from the world energy and 40 from the raw materials/US Department of Energy/. Almost 80 of the construction materials of a building simply throw up after their life, due to inability to recycle.
If we consider:
- Estimated consumption of materials (energy, water, etc.);
- Expected emissions in air, water, soil;
- Expected contamination, by physical effects such as noise, vibration, radiation, electromagnetic fields;
- Expected creation of waste materials;
- Reusable
It is clearly evident that natural building materials have very good indicators on all these criteria. Adding their potential in the current topic of increasing the energy efficiency of the building stock and their use as a heat-insulating product combined with the possibility of using local resources and technologies for production with low carbon footprint, natural building materials are proving to be a really important part of the chain on the path to sustainable development.
Construction with thatched bales, for example, saves energy and reduces carbon emissions for several reasons:
- Low-carbon production and application technologies
- Energy savings from heating (up to 75) during the life cycle of the building because of the good insulating qualities of straw
- Has a negative carbon footprint due to the uptake of CO2, through the photosynthesis of plants and crop growth and its storage in the material (for the growth of a tree it takes 50 g, and cultivation of wheat, hemp, cane becomes yearly)
- For the amount of energy invested, an average of one conventional building is 100 000 KWh. A home built mainly with natural (raw materials) can be easily reached with 10 000 KWh. This is 1/10 of the energy that is usually moisture in the conventional building.
Average energy consumption of thatched bales of cubic meters Comes out around 73 KWh/m3; For comparison for the construction of a building of the same size, made of bricks and with insulation of mineral or glass wool goes to 5 to 11 times more energy invested.
Sources of information and graphic material:
The IBN Institut fuer Baubiologie (Building Biology) & Oekologie, Biohomeshop, Association for construction with natural materials, ModeCell, Econest, Energy Assessment of a Straw Bale Building: Carol Atkinson, Inhabitat