Haven’t you ever wondered, what IS a straw bale house?

The following is an excerpt from Serious Straw Bale: A Home Construction Guide for All Climates by Paul Lacinski and Michael Bergeron. It has been adapted for the web.

WHAT IS A STRAW BALE HOUSE?

Why are bales a good choice in a cold climate? Can bale walls be designed to withstand the vagaries of weather in the snow belt? These are questions we’ve been asking of ourselves for a good many years, and they have now become the guiding questions behind this book. To begin at the beginning, however, we must ponder this question of why. The idea of building a wall of bales seems to entice people’s imaginations. Why bales? We have come to believe that people are searching for alternatives to the plywood palace, to the modular mentality that has come to dominate the mainstream construction industry. Most new houses today are made of the same materials: machined sticks and sheets of wood, plastic, metal, and gypsum. They are usually assembled according to the same set of principles, so that once you’ve built a few, they get pretty boring. Except for that small percentage in which a designer, owner, or builder puts some real thought into creating a form and finish that suits the owner and the site, these houses somehow feel the same.

There are three main reasons that straw bale construction is different. First of all, bale walls look very different from sheetrock walls. They look like the product of a human, rather than the product of a machine. Though bales are a new material (which makes design work challenging and fun), the feel of the finished wall harkens back to the preindustrial era. It seems that as our lives become increasingly technological, more and more people want to surround themselves with spaces that feel handmade and timeless.

Process is the second reason. Conventional construction is mathematical and precise, while bales and plaster are sloppy and intuitive. These characteristics are inviting to amateur builders, not only because they make bale construction easy to learn, but because they stand in contrast to the obsessive efficiency that most of us have had to accept as a part of the industrial economy. People see bale construction as a chance to cut loose.

Third, bale construction feels like an alternative to ecological waste. It’s akin to recycling. Recycling enjoys broad support across the political spectrum, because it’s obvious, it’s easy, and it gives people a sense that they can at least do something that is not harmful to the planet. While our agriculture is far from perfect, it does produce a lot of straw, so using some of it for construction makes intuitive sense.

Bruce Millard, a thoughtful architect from Sandpoint, Idaho, has developed this idea about building with bales a bit further. “Once people try this type of construction, they absorb it and agree with it, and begin to recognize it as a concept, as a psychological departure from the idea that industry is somehow more sophisticated than nature. It brings the left and the right together; it functions as a stepping block into an ecological way of building and living. People begin to ask, ‘How can I put this to work in the rest of my life?’”

Bruce sees the bale itself as a short-lived material. “We will soon realize that straw is very valuable—it will start going into particleboard and panelized materials, and it might be mixed with wood fiber for paper production.” Bruce uses the bale as an introduction to a whole array of recycled-content panels and blocks.

Bales also tend to serve as an introduction to traditional natural building techniques from around the world, all of which have much longer track records than the bale itself. Loose straw has been used for millennia in combination with clay and sand, for everything from plasters to load-bearing walls. Five-hundred-year-old examples of straw and clay infill are still in use in Germany, and this material has actually been rewetted and put back into wall cavities during restoration. Thatch makes a beautiful, durable, insulative roof. These and other techniques must be explored and developed if we are to continue to create decent housing for future generations on this planet. (See chapter 15, “Beyond the Bale.”)

Why Build a House of Straw Bales?

“Didn’t you learn anything from the first little pig?”

A mouthful of oatmeal and an earful of propaganda against building with straw; many of us were spoon-fed this breakfast throughout our childhoods. How is it, then, that perfectly sane people can consider living in a house whose walls are bales of straw? Maybe urbanization, suburbanization, and the decrease in the North American wolf population has lulled them into a sense of complacency about this domestic predator. Or maybe bales make such unusual walls that many of us are just willing to take the risk.

Beauty

The most compelling among many reasons to build with bales is the quiet beauty of bale walls. Unlike walls of panelized materials, which require layers of ornamentation to bring life to their unnaturally uniform surfaces, bale walls look and feel as if they were made by hand. Their deep windowsills and gentle undulations lend a comfortably safe, quiet feeling to the interior of a home, while the plaster finish softly gathers and reflects light, changing in subtle ways as the sun shifts through each day and season. The effect is a heightened connection between indoor and outdoor worlds, an especially important relationship in climates where people spend a good part of the year inside buildings.

“We fell in love with the deep windowsills and rounded corners.”
“I like the massive feel, and the flexibility, of the bales; you can do anything with them, curvy or straight.”
“The house has a solid, embracing feeling, like it has its arms wrapped around me.”

Paul often describes bale walls as “plastered stone for the person of moderate means.” This is not to imply that bale walls don’t have a character of their own, which they certainly do; the point is that the massive, rounded feel of the bale wall is reminiscent of the old-world solidity of stone. (Bale walls also offer far more insulation value than stone walls, but we’ll get to that later.) Part of the appeal of bale buildings is that they just feel safe. Storms can be howling outside, or cars roaring along a nearby highway at twice the reasonable rate, and after the (good-quality) door clicks shut on a straw bale house, you will find yourself in near total silence. This sort of quiet allows the home to act as a refuge for the psyche; a place where the senses can escape the busy din of the postindustrial world.

Insulation Value

Straw bale houses may look and feel like plastered stone or earth houses, but they are in a different thermal category, entirely. Old stone houses are cold. New stone houses are typically built with foam insulation, either sandwiched between two independent stone walls, or blown onto the inside face of the stone. Both of these methods are quite expensive. Plastered bales, on the other hand, provide a highly insulative wall at a price that is competitive with quality conventional construction. […]

Picture it: the island of Manhattan as seen from space. Rather than one rectangular island of green—Central Park—floating in an unfriendly ocean of grays and blacks, imagine that ocean dotted with thousands of smaller islands. That’s right—I’m talking about rooftop gardens.

Think of the benefits. The cooling effect of a green roof means a drop in energy used for air conditioning in the summer, which means a reduced burden on the electrical grid, less fossil fuels getting used up to produce electricity, and fewer carbon emissions. It means fresh, local food right right at your doorstep (or above your head, as the case may be). And it means easing the burden on the city’s sewer system during severe rainstorms: the soil will just soak it right up. Think of it as earth-sheltered housing for the inner city. You don’t even have to build a new structure to do it.

BBC News sent a camera crew to New York City to film the project, headed by Lisa Goode of Goode Green.

Watch It Now

Ty Pennington, host of the outrageously popular ABC’s Extreme Home Makeover, recently took a trip through the UK to explore different home-building techniques. Luckily for us, he ran into Katy Bryce and Adam Weismann, authors of Building with Cob: A Step-by-Step Guide. In the video I’ve linked below, Adam—amid a circus of children, clay, and playground equipment—discusses with Ty the various benefits of building with cob. Ty gets it. He provides the following great quote.

“Wow. [It’s] interesting that something that comes from earth…soil…dirt, is actually more intelligent way to go than technology.”

Boom. Are you listening ABC? How about a new show…Extreme Home Greenover hosted by Katy Bryce and Adam Weismann. Rip down your toothpicks-wrapped-in-plastic-house! Put up cob! It’s got legs baby! Legs!

Check out the video here.

These days, it’s hot enough up here in Vermont that a person could forget what the winters are like. But make no mistake: winter will come, and when it does, the energy efficiency of your home will once again be a major concern.

Building a house? Moving into a new place? If you’re thinking about whether a one- or two-story house will be the best fit for your family, you’ll probably want to know which setup will use your heat energy more effectively. Based on that criteria, your best bet will actually be the two-story job.

Rob Roy explains. (With numbers!)

The following is an excerpt from Mortgage Free! Innovative Strategies for Debt-free Home Ownership, Second Edition by Rob Roy. It has been adapted for the Web.

Heat Loss Comparison of One- and Two-Story Design

For the sake of easy figuring, we’ll compare a simple 32-foot-square one-story design with a 32-foot-square two-story design, each built on a floating slab. Each story has 9-foot-high walls, and the stairwell space eats up 48 square feet on each floor, so 96 SF of useful floor area is lost to the need of accessing the second story.

Gain in skin area with two-story house: 4,352 SF – 3,200 SF = 1,152 SF
Percentage gain in skin area: 1,152 SF ÷ 3,200 SF = 36 percent
Gain in useful floor area with two stories: 1,952 SF – 1,024 SF = 928 SF
Percentage gain in floor area: 928 SF ÷ 1,024 SF = 91 percent

Bottom line: Adding the second story increases usable floor space by 91 percent with only 36 percent more skin area. And that’s not all. Warm air rises. We may as well use it twice before it leaves us. If the primary heat source warms the air in the lower story, we can use the heat again upstairs. Strategic placement and use of floor registers, internal doors, and the stairwell itself will allow passive delivery of this heat, and the effect can be controlled further with a simple fan in the ceiling of the first story.

The outdated and complicated laws regarding rainwater catchment in Colorado are set to expire soon, allowing savvy rainwater harvesters to do what comes naturally. Rather than using up energy to pump water up from the ground while letting rainwater evaporate before it gets near any stream, rainwater catchment systems allow homeowners to harness nature’s bounty. Waste not, want not.

From the New York Times:

DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.

Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.

Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.

“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”

Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade.

The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching.

Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah, collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe.

And in Arizona, cities like Tucson are pioneering the practices of big-city rain capture. “All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it,” Tucson Water says on its Web site.

Here in Colorado, the old law created a kind of wink-and-nod shadow economy. Rain equipment could be legally sold, but retailers said they knew better than to ask what the buyer intended to do with the product.

“It’s like being able to sell things like smoking paraphernalia even though smoking pot is illegal,” said Laurie E. Dickson, who for years sold barrel-and-hose systems from a shop in downtown Durango.

Read the whole article here.

Related Articles:

• Save Money By Saving Rainwater
• Out West, a Legal Victory for Rainwater Harvesting
• Free Your Water: Fundamentals of a Rainwater Harvesting System

It’s been a rainy, rainy June on the east coast. Sun has peeked out for maybe an hour here and there, but otherwise it’s been gray, dismal, and all around not summery. It’s a drag, no question about it! But despair no more—there happens to be one exception to this depressingly soggy month. For those residing in the wet areas, you can save actually money by saving your water. You think that’s rain you feel on your shoulders? Nope. That’s actually cash money falling right from the sky. And for the sake of making lemonade out of June’s lemons—I invite you to save money this rainy month by collecting your rainwater, for drier days to come. Start by creating a simple rain barrel.

The following is an excerpt from The Carbon-Free Home: 36 Remodeling Projects to Help Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit by Stephen & Rebekah Hren. It has been formatted for the Web.

Rain Barrel
Renter friendly.
Project Time: Afternoon.
Cost: $20–100.
Energy Saved: Low. Catching rainwater preserves the mechanical energy of the falling water created by solar distillation and releases it later when plants need it.
Ease of Use: Easy.
Maintenance Level: Low to medium. An occasional cleaning may be required, and some spring and fall maintenance is likely in colder areas.
Skill Levels: Carpentry: Basic. Plumbing: Basic.
Materials: 55-gallon food-grade barrel or premanufactured rain barrel, 45-degree turn that matches existing gutter, self-tapping metal screws, extra length of downspout, two wood posts at least 4 × 4 × 8, scrap 1 × material, nails OR 6–8 cement blocks (8 × 16). If modifying regular barrel: 3/4-inch PVC bulkhead fitting or other 3/4-inch fitting with gasket, 3/4-inch hose bibb (sillcock), fiberglass or metal window screen.
Tools: Wood saw, hack saw, drill, drill bits, level, ladder.

The barrel. Rain barrels are often sold at garden shops and agricultural supply stores. Typically they are 55–80 gallons and made of solid black polypropylene plastic that will hold up well for 20–25 years. Some enlightened municipalities sell discounted barrels or hold rain-barrel-building workshops.

Modifying a regular barrel. All that distinguish a rain barrel from a food-grade barrel are a perforated, screened top to let in water but keep out mosquitoes, a hose bibb (also known as a sillcock or wall hydrant) about a quarter of the way up from the bottom of the barrel that a hose can be attached to, and an overflow spout at the top.

Suitable food-grade barrels are not hard to find for free; just make sure the one you use didn’t ever contain anything caustic. Large food producers are often willing to part with extras to whoever bothers to ask. Locally, we know of folks who have been given barrels by a Coca-Cola bottler, a pickle company, and a salad dressing maker. It’s worth spending a little bit of time on the phone asking around if you’re otherwise going to have to pay retail for a rain barrel, especially if you want more than one, because modifying a food barrel is relatively easy. There are also Web sites like www.freecycle.org where you can find useful materials for free in many parts of the country. Look for a waste or scrap exchange in your area!

For the faucet we like to avoid threading our own fittings, which takes a specialized tap tool. Instead, you can use what is sometimes referred to as a “bulkhead fitting” to make the watertight connection through the tank. These can be hard to find in home improvement stores but are readily available and inexpensive over the Internet. Browsing through the plumbing aisles you might find an even better fitting to use, for example, water heater pans include a nearly perfect fitting that can be unscrewed, with a gasket already attached.

Drill a pilot hole (with a spade-tip bit or small hole saw) into the barrel about 6–8 inches up from the bottom that matches the part of your fitting (whether threaded or straight) that will go through the tank wall. If you’re using a bulkhead fitting, remove the locknut from the fitting, leaving the gasket on the body. Insert the body through the hole in the tank from the inside, trapping the washer between the inside tank wall and the fitting. Screw the locknut back onto the outside of the fitting for a leak-free installation. You may need to employ a friend to hold one side to get it tight. Next, screw the hose bibb onto the fitting. Depending on what type of fitting you ended up with, you will need either a male or female hose bibb.

Next you’ll need to either drill holes in the top or cut a chunk out of the lid to let in water. If you’re cutting many holes, use at least a 3/4-inch bit and make at least a dozen holes, mostly in the middle. This will produce lots of obnoxious plastic filings, so do it someplace where you can sweep them up and throw them in the trash. If you decide to cut a square out of the lid, a jigsaw or hacksaw will do the trick. You should attach window screen (fiberglass or metal) to the top of the barrel to keep mosquitoes from entering. Drill pairs of small holes along the edge of the top and then weave scrap pieces of wire through the holes and the screen in about 10 different locations. Alternatively, you can place a large piece of screen over the top of the entire barrel and tie it down around the outside perimeter with wire or twine. The downspout will rest on top of this screen.

In case of downpours when your tank is full, make an overflow drain on the top of the tank. You can follow the instructions above for the faucet hole, but install the overflow drain not more than an inch below the top of the tank. It is also possible to attach barrels one to another via the overflow port.

The stand. Getting that rain barrel up off the ground at least a few feet will mean more water pressure and easier watering. Depending on the lay of the land and where your garden is, you may want it to be up as high as 4 feet, although making a steady stand that high is a little more difficult and rain barrels that high up look somewhat strange.

The easiest and most reliable stand is made from stacked pairs of cement blocks. Level the area underneath where your barrel will go, usually directly in front of your gutter, although you can use side turns for your gutter to move it a few feet to the left or right. Place a pair of blocks side by side, preferably with the holes facing up, as this is stronger. Alternate direction for the next set and build up the base to the desired height.

For a wood stand, cut four 4 × 4 posts to the desired height. Using scrap wood, make a square by nailing equal-length boards to the sides of the four posts about halfway up. The length of the sides should be slightly larger than the diameter of the barrel so the barrel can sit on top without overlapping the edge. Add another row of boards around the top, and then nail in scraps of wood on top to support the barrel. Do a thorough job of nailing and use boards at least 3/4 inch thick, because a full rain barrel can weigh more than 400 pounds.

Level the stand and put up your barrel. If you don’t have an overflow faucet on your barrel, be conscious of where the overflow will go. You don’t want to cause erosion.

The downspout. Full rain barrels in cold climates can freeze solid and potentially burst, so in most of the country it’s wise to remove the barrel during winter months. Black barrels that get plenty of sun can keep water above freezing in marginal climates, but you are taking a risk leaving the barrel full. Cold climates make dealing with the downspout a little more difficult, as the removed barrel will leave the curved downspout high above the level of the home, potentially spraying the home or causing erosion during drainage.

The best way to deal with this is to keep the existing length of downspout intact and purchase additional gutter (measure the width before you go to the store) for the rain barrel. Basically you’ll be making a summertime section of gutter for when the barrel is in operation and then replacing it with the original gutter when it starts to get cold.

To install the new downspout, once your barrel is in place, remove the old downspout and with a hacksaw cut a new piece of downspout that will end about 6 inches above the tank. Attach the new shorter piece of downspout to the gutter. Next you will cut a second short piece of downspout that will run from the wall to the top of the tank. Measure from the new downspout to the tank at approximately a 45-degree angle and take into account the added length of the 45-degree piece that will connect these two pieces (probably adding about 2 inches). Cut a piece of downspout to this length, and attach it to the 45-degree turn using some self-tapping metal screws, and then screw this whole piece to the downspout along the house.

The other option is to use a length of flexible gutter to connect the gutter to the barrel. You may find it more difficult to keep this in place, however.

Regarding Malcolm Wells‘ The Earth-Sheltered House: An Architect’s Sketchbook: what looks at first blush like a collection of fanciful schematics turns out to be a bittersweet album of unrealized dreams, or maybe a hopeful blueprint of a future that might be. That’s according to chronicle.com.

There’s more:

The careers of architects are littered with buildings that never found a client or a budget and never emerged from the ground. Those buildings exist merely as dreams of what could have been — and dreams of the world they might have helped create.

Dream buildings sometimes leave architects amused, sometimes bitter. Rarely are they as entertaining and as poignant as Malcolm Wells, the pioneer of underground architecture. The Earth-Sheltered House, which has just been reissued by Chelsea Green Publishing, serves as both a manifesto for underground building and a review of Mr. Wells’s career, as recalled by the architect himself. Of course, underground building has not (yet) taken off as a popular architectural form, so the designs in the book are mostly unrealized — the clients did not accept the design, or ran out of money, or simply disappeared. The book feels very personal, very intimate. The text is written out in longhand, so Mr. Wells’s disappointment at failed projects, his confessions about faulty designs, and his zeal for sustainable architecture all reach out from the page to grab the reader. The tone is often one of self-deprecating humor, but also one of sadness at the unsustainable state of architecture and (from Mr. Wells’s perspective) at the fact that the world has missed its chance for a revolution in underground building.

Well, so far, anyway. Mr. Wells’s designs may remind readers of fashions in 1970s architecture and at the same time evoke visions of a sustainable utopian future — one of buildings constructed by a society that has both embraced advanced technology and returned to live among the trees.

Even though the book is called The Earth-Sheltered House, many of the featured designs were commissioned by colleges, like this dormitory that Mr. Wells designed for “a Catholic university in Minnesota” around 1978. (Given its fondness for good architecture, St. John’s University could well have been the mystery institution.) The building featured a solar greenhouse at one end, but “the great cross was not done consciously,” he writes.

Read the whole article here.

You live in an arid climate. Should you be allowed to collect the scant rainwater that falls on your roof? Seems like a no-brainer to me.

But until very recently, it was a crime in Colorado to use a rainwater catchment system to collect the rain or snow that fell on your roof. The state considered that stealing, and penalties were hefty. But the Centennial State (Um, that’s Colorado. Yeah, I had to look it up.) recently passed a law making certain rainwater catchment systems legal, under certain conditions. It seems like a minor victory, but it may signal bigger changes coming to the West as populations continue to rise and demand for water goes up.

From NPR’s Morning Edition:

The West remains one of the fastest growing regions of the country, and that continues to put pressure on scarce water supplies.

So, Colorado recently made it legal for some homeowners to capture and collect the raindrops and snowflakes that fall on their own roofs. That had been considered stealing because the water would flow into a stream or aquifer, where it belonged to someone else; Utah and Washington state have similar bans.

The change in Colorado may seem minor, but this could signal the beginning of a water-law revolution.

Water law in the West is different than in the East. In the West, there’s essentially a long line for water rights; those who signed up for rights first are in front. And in some cases around the West, Native Americans are near the front of the line because they’ve lived there for so long.

For five years, Karl Hanzel “took cuts” in that line because he illegally collected water from the snow that fell on his home outside Boulder, Colo.

“I struggle to understand the argument for these laws. It doesn’t really make sense to me,” says Hanzel. “The water that I’m detaining here, I’m not exporting it to Mars … We have a leach field; we water the garden; that water is still returned to the earth … We’re just holding some of it for awhile.”

Colorado takes this sort of illegal harvesting of precipitation seriously. If caught, Hanzel could have faced fines of up to $500 a day. Luckily for him, a law recently passed legalizes his collection system. It’s a narrow exception to the ban for people who would have to dig a well or have water trucked in.

Read the whole article here.

Related Articles:

• How Important Is Watering Your Plants?
• The Case for Rainwater Harvesting
• How to Plan Your Ecological Water-Harvesting System

Imagine lying in the cool grass on a warm spring day, soaking up the sun, feeling the earth between your toes, counting the clouds—then climbing down off your roof to go inside and get yourself a glass of lemonade.

An earth-sheltered house just might be the next best thing to living in a Hobbit hole—and for some of us, they’re a dream come true.

Architect and author Malcolm Wells wrote the book on earth-sheltered houses. And now that book is back in print, with a new foreword by the author. Chelsea Green is proud to re-release The Earth-Sheltered House: An Architect’s Sketchbook, a classic in the field of green building.

This video gives a brief tour of the entrance to the courtyard of Wells’ underground office in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Thanks to Greg LaVardera for the video.

The following is an excerpt from When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self-Reliance, Sustainability, and Surviving the Long Emergency by Matthew Stein. It has been adapted for the Web.

To evaluate whether a given building material or system is truly “green,” one must look at the whole life cycle of the material and/or system. For example, since wood is a renewable resource, it is “green” if it is sustainably harvested, but it’s not green if its unsustainable harvest contributes to deforestation. Consider the case of cement, which is the glue that makes concrete hard and strong. Cement is an energy-intensive material to manufacture (contributing to 8 percent to global greenhouse gas emissions), and requires quarrying huge tracts of land to obtain its raw materials. Due to the extreme longevity of concrete-based construction, which can last for many centuries, its use can be considered “green” if it is part of a building system that uses cement efficiently and has insulating features that minimize heating and cooling requirements.

For example, a building with exterior walls composed of solid, concrete-filled, uninsulated concrete blocks, and located in a cold or hot climate, not only uses a high volume of cement to construct the building, but will also require large inputs of energy to heat and/or cool the building over its entire lifetime. On the other hand, various concrete-based building systems using insulated concrete forms (ICFs) will use less cement, and the end result will be a highly insulated, energy-efficient building that consumes a fraction of the energy of an average home. In additional to ICFs, there are other concrete-based building systems using structural insulated concrete panels (SCIPs) that further optimize and reduce both the cement and structural steel content and offer the benefit of a high thermal mass in contact with the living spaces to help stabilize inside air temperatures, further reducing both initial material requirements and energy consumption.

Another example is the use of recycled building materials. In the case of recycled lumber, its use clearly reduces deforestation and saves the energy inputs needed to cut, mill, and transport additional lumber, so it is obviously a “green” alternative. However, to recycle an old window may be a false saving, if the climate is hot or cold and using the old window results in large energy inputs over the life of the building for heating and/or cooling. In this case, the use of the recycled window is definitely not green.

In today’s market, selling yourself or your product as “green” has proven to be a valuable marketing tool. In fact, “greenwashing” (representing a builder, building system, or product as “green” even when it isn’t) has become a real problem. So how is one to know what is truly green and what is not? Most of us don’t have the time, energy, or technical training to properly make this determination on our own. Fortunately, there are organizations out there whose business is to evaluate products, materials, and systems in an unbiased manner, so we can use their certifications and recommendations to help us to make truly green choices in our building decisions.

A great place to start is with BuildingGreen Inc.’s Green Building Products: The GreenSpec Guide to Residential Building Materials. This encyclopedia of green building materials includes paint, structural systems, certified lumber, appliances, site preparations, landscaping, and so on. Manufacturers do not pay to be included in GreenSpec, and the decisions about which products to be included in GreenSpec are based totally on criteria developed by the GreenSpec and Environmental Building News editorial teams. The introduction to Green Building Products offers an excellent description of what makes a product “green,” and they offer a huge amount of free information and articles at www.BuildingGreen.com.

There are independent “green” certification organizations whose stamps you can trust, but be aware that there are also several industry-sponsored look-alikes whose certifications are meaningless (greenwashing). For example, in general you can trust that the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) stamp on lumber indicates that it was harvested by a lumber company that has gone through independent third-party certification to certify that it is operating using sustainable forest management practices. On the other hand, you can’t trust certification from industry-funded knock-offs like the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), which does not require independent, third-party certification, so that basically the fox is guarding the henhouse.

Other trustworthy, independent “green” certifications include LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and BEES (Building for Environmental and Economic Sustainability). Also, a set of standards is being developed for EPP (Environmentally Preferable Products) by a consortium of green-certification organizations such as Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), Green Seal, GreenBlue, and the Institute for Market Transformation to Sustainability (MTS). Even though LEED certification generally applies to commercial buildings and large-scale residential developments, the LEED principles for guiding and evaluating the design and construction process are just as applicable to smallscale residential buildings.