Mukoddas Syuhada

Well, not gasoline per say but something strangely close . With minimal filtering and no refining these amazing trees produce fuel for up to 70 years and and at a rate of 1 barrel per 4 trees per year. After extraction, the fuel must be used within a few months but can be put almost directly to work in a diesel engine. However, even if the fuel is left for too long it changes into another form of oil that fetches a fairly high market price as a medicinal substance. The implications of this go beyond another form of fuel production. Family farmers could use a few acres or less to power their equipment and vehicles, saving not only the cost (environmental and otherwise) of purchasing standard fuel but also the ecological cost of transporting fuels across great distances to reach rural areas. As of right now, unfortunately this particular species of tree has a difficult time growing outside of tropical environments. It is also difficult for a novice farmer to cultivate. However,

Let’s face it, trying to solve a big problem in one quick step rarely works out, particularly when the problem is global and touches on virtually all kinds of transporation. Too many alternative energy concept vehicles try too hard to rely on a single source of energy. Electric cars need frequent recharges and solar-powered vehicles of course need the sun. These three vehicles are a worthy stop-gap measure as the world slowly learns to rely less and less on conventional fuel sources and turns more and more to renewable energy. The Canadian Eco-Cab, however, is a hybrid of the best kind : it operates on two relatively eco-friendly fuel sources, human power and electricity, and avoids the need for fossil fuels altogether. The net result: the cabs can go at speeds faster than a bicycle and keep up relatively well with low-speed traffic and therefore be competitive modes of transportation. Just this month Boeing set the record for the first manned airplane flight powered by hydr

A basic tenet of sustainability is to share what you have with others. Doing this can diminish the need for unnecessary duplication of facilities. In this way a group of people can not only have fewer tools or appliances or functional areas, but at the same time they can have available a greater variety of these facilities. This benefits both the environment (through less industrial activity) and the individual (by providing more options for living.) Architecturally, a prime example of sharing facilities is what is known as co-housing. With this, a group of people agree to live in a housing situation that is designed so that each family unit has their own basic living accommodations, which are private, but then there are other facilities used in common. For instance, each family might have their own bedrooms, bathrooms, living room and small kitchenette, and then all of the residents might share the use of laundry facilities, meeting room, recreation room, swimming pool, a large

Let nature keep your food cool. In the old days people relied on pantries and root cellars to help keep produce and other provisions fresh. Ice boxes made way for refrigerators, which are obviously much more convenient, but somehow the use of cool pantries and root cellars also fell by the wayside. This is too bad because these spaces havefunctions that a refrigerator simply can't The temperature in the pantry ranges between about 40 and 60 degrees F. year round. replace. Root cellars can store large quantities of produce from the time of harvest until the next summer. Cool pantries can store some produce, but also all manner of other foodstuffs and kitchen supplies can be kept there. Cool, dry storage is the best way to preserve most f

Few things give me more pleasure than living amongst green plants, especially when they are edible. If you couple this with the possibility of helping to heat your house, you can readily see why people become attached to their attached greenhouses. I have built several of them, with different materials and designs, but the basic concepts are really pretty simple. It is best to design an attached greenhouse into the original house plan, but it is often quite feasible to retrofit one onto an existing house. You need some space on the south side of the house wide enough to accommodate a growing bed and space for access. The area should not be obstructed by trees or other things that would limit the available sun light. It could have an outside entrance, but it doesn't have to.

A prime ingredient of sustainable architecture is durability. If a building doesn't last for a long time, it would be a waste of a lot of embodied energy, from both a human and a resource perspective…not to mention the economic loss. Building to last is partly a matter of consciousness; we need to value old architecture. Too often builders will do shoddy work or make poor choices of construction materials because there is a sentiment that it really only needs to last a few decades, and then it will be torn down to create the almighty NEW. Architectural styles change, codes change, building materials change, family needs change…so why expect a building to last? To find out what sorts of buildings have lasted for over a century, Rosana and I decided to visit the oldest continually inhabited town in Colorado: San Luis. Established in 1851 by Spanish immigrants on original Spa

It is satisfying, fun and economical to reuse old building materials. In our society there has been a stigma attached to "used" stuff. We value "new" above all else, or at least the advertising forces would have us believe that. Antiques, of course, have acquired their own cachet and their value is hyped, primarily because of rarity. It's that middle ground of stuff that isn't new and hasn't acquired the status of being "antique" that I would like to focus on here. The local dump is a great place to look for such stuff because it is often perceived as valueless. Our local dump actually has an area set aside for potentially reusable items, and they encourage people to sort through it. We found our kitchen sink there, in perfectly good condition, except for a little chip in the corner that I covered with tile. The virtue of recycling used bui

Having lived for many years in the Pacific Northwest, I can attest to the appalling degradation of national and private forests. While wood is ostensibly a renewable resource, we have gone way beyond sustainable harvesting and have ruined enormous ecosystems. Use wood as decoration. Cull dead trees for structural supports. Use masonry, straw bales, papercrete, cob, adobe, rocks, bags of volcanic rock, etc., instead of wood. Unfortunately it is difficult to get away from lumber in making a roof, so consider making a dome from materials that can be stacked. Domes are also more energy efficient and use less materials for the same space as a box. A conventional straw bale house only diminishes the amount of wood used by about 15%! Homes can be made with certified sustainably harvested trees. This means that the forests where the trees are harvested are carefully mo

In almost all localities, nature has provided us with some wonderful materials to build with. Because these materials require little processing or transporting, the environmental and economic costs are low. Some are renewable resources (like trees and straw), and some may be so abundant that their supply seems almost inexhaustible (like rocks and sand). One of the beauties of building with local materials is that they seem to fit well with the feeling of the place, naturally. This rock wall made with our local stones lends a grotto-like feeling to our shower For me, the most prized local gems are the rocks. What can you do with these rocks, besides admire

The average person in the U. S. uses between 100 and 250 gallons of water a day. I know it is possible to get by just fine on one tenth that amount. The use of low water capacity toilets, flow restrictors at shower heads and faucet aerators are fairly common now. More radical conservation approaches include diverting gray water from bathing, clothes washing and bathroom sinks to watering plants; catching rain water from roofs and paved areas for domestic use and switching to composting toilets. These can be very effective and safe means of water conservation if done carefully to avoid bacterial infestation; be sure to comply with all local laws that regulate these strategies. Landscaping with drought tolerant, indigenous plants can also save an enormous amount of water.

There are many ways to conserve the use of fossil fuel; using the sun, wind, or water to produce electricity are among them. If you choose to do this, you will be forced to be careful in the way you use your electricity because it is limited. Whether you get your electricity from alternative sources or from the grid, it pays to choose energy efficient appliances. Front-loading clothes washers, for instance, use much less electricity, water and soap than the top-loaders. Compact florescent lights use about a third of the electricity of standard bulbs. Many appliances use electricity by just being plugged in (known as phantom loads); be sure to avoid this.

A well designed solar house is both warm when you want it and cool when you want it; that is to say, the temperature tends to stay fairly even. A good way to keep your cool is to dig into the earth. About six feet under the earth, you will find that the temperature varies by only a few degrees year round. While this temperature (about 50-55 degrees F.) might be too cool for general living comfort, you can use the stability of the earth's temperature to moderate the thermal fluctuations of the house. If you dig into a south-facing hillside to build, or berm the north part of the house with soil, you can take advantage of this. The part of the house that is underground needs to be well insulated, or the earth will continually suck warmth out of the house.

Nothing can be more comfortable for body and mind than living in a good solar-heated house. I say "good", because proper design is crucial to the comfort of such a house. You may have gone into a solar house and felt stifled by the glaring heat, or perhaps you shivered from the lack of it. Good passive solar design will provide just enough sunlight into the rooms to be absorbed by the surrounding thermal mass (usually masonry materials), so that the heat will be given back into the room when the sun goes down. The thermal mass is a kind of "heat battery" that stores the warmth, absorbing it to keep the room from getting too hot during the day. Equally important to thermal mass is insulation (such as straw bales or crushed volcanic rock) that will keep that heat inside. Thermal mass materials need to be insulated from the outside, or else they will just bleed t

As “consumers” we are frequently confronted with life style decisions that can impact our environment. There are a few choices in this life that can make a big difference in what the quality of life will be for those who follow us. Going with the flow of our culture is hard to avoid, and unfortunately the flow is not in the right direction for evolving a sustainable future. One of the most momentous choices that any of us will make is the kind of house we live in. I have come up with a list of thirteen principles of sustainable architecture that can guide you in your housing choices. Small is beautiful . The trend lately has been toward huge mansion-style houses. While these might fit the egos of those who purchase them, they don't fit with a sustainable life style. Large houses generally use a tremendous amount of energy to heat and cool. This energy usually comes from the combustion of fossil fuels, depleting these resources and emitting greenhouse gases

Why build and live in a small house? First of all, it is more convenient to have what you need nearby. Life proceeds smoothly when the things you need are close at hand. Also, I might point out that limited space forces you to select only those things that you really need to live with, helping to keep clutter out of your life. Another fairly obvious point is that a smaller house costs less to build and maintain. Housing represents the greatest expense that most of us face in this life. It is common to take on huge debt to pay for a house, which multiplies the cost even further, and places us in a kind of servitude to both the creditors and the house. Rob Roy, in his book “Mortgage Free!,” points out that the word mortgage comes from old French, and means “death pledge.” In it he describes many ways to build without debt. If you are able to own your house free and clear, all those years of your life that would have gone into paying off the debt can be utilized to positively

I write a Q and A column about cordwood masonry for Kelly Hart's excellent Green Home Building website, www.greenhomebuilding.com Recently, the following question came in, and I got so caught up in it that I called BackHome magazine editor Richard Freudenberger to see if he'd like to see it expanded into an article. So here it is. Question from Anonymous: How can you consider cordwood as "green" when it uses so much cement in the mortar? Great question, one I'm glad to have the opportunity to answer. First, I guess we have to come up with some sort of definition about what “green” means, with regard to building. My own view is that a green building must have a significant degree of the following elements: sustainability, leaving little impact on the planet, energy-efficiency in the making (often referred to as “embodied energy”) and energy-efficiency in performance (fuel efficiency for heating and cooling.) A closely related element wou

Timber framing, or post and beam, and pole construction are all ancient methods of providing a rigid framework for constructing buildings. Pole building usually refers to actually planting poles in the ground to secure the structure and provide the foundation, whereas timber framing and post and beam construction require a separate foundation. Because of the difficulty of preserving wooden poles that are sunk into the ground over time, this method is most often reserved for what might be considered temporary or agricultural use, such as for barns or sheds. With a minimum of heavy-duty timbers, beams, posts, this technique can create strong and versatile load-bearing structures, which can then be completed by either in-filling between the wooden structural members, or completely wrapping them with a variety of other materials. Since this method of building has been recognized and approved by most code authorities, it is a way of approaching a natural building project that would

Bamboo is one of the most amazingly versatile and sustainable building materials available. It grows remarkably fast and in a wide range of climates. It is exceedingly strong for its weight and can be used both structurally and as a finish material. The canes are beautiful when exposed and they can be cut in such a way as to be re-combined into useful products such as flooring. There is a long vernacular tradition to the use of bamboo in structures in many parts of the world, especially in more tropical climates, where it grows into larger diameter canes. One tricky aspect to the use of bamboo is in the joinery; since its strength comes from its integral structure, it cannot be joined with many of the traditional techniques used with wood. This where the old ways of building with bamboo can be especially informative. I expect that the value of bamboo as a building material will only become more apparent as we move toward a time of wood scarcity and high costs of energy.

“Natural building” has become a catch phrase for a variety of building techniques that generally employ unprocessed natural materials, such as earth, stone, and straw. The focus is mainly on the material itself, and to some extent the methods that are used to work with the material, rather than the architectural design or other aspects of building that might be explored. If the phrase is reversed to “building naturally,” this opens up a whole new level of consideration. Just what does it mean to build naturally , or to build with nature ? If we use the natural world as a guide for how to build our homes, we could look to other animals and see how they do it. Whatever they use to build with will be found locally; they don't waste energy carrying things great distances. Beaver cut saplings along the creek bed to dam the stream and create a fortified home. Birds collect twigs and grass to make their nests. Some wasps gather mud to form protected s

"Natural building" is an umbrella term than connotes any sort of building that is accomplished with the use of natural materials primarily, as opposed to the use of man-made or industrial materials. There is, of course, a blurring of this distinction when any specific material or building technique is examined, because the influence of technology is all-pervasive in today's world. Still, it is worthwhile to focus on those ways of building that minimize the use of products that require considerable embodied energy for their manufacture or transportation. The objective is to build with simple techniques that don't further pollute the environment, consume more fossil fuel, or unnecessarily extract the resources of Mother Earth. Such techniques, by their very nature, have an aesthetic value that tends to blend in with the environment and &quo

There are many wonderful building styles from all over the world that can inform us with their shapes, materials, arrangements, decorations, concepts for heating and cooling, etc. Vernacular architecture has been loosing ground over the last couple of centuries, as modern methods prevail. This is unfortunate since many of the old ways employ natural materials and simple concepts that are energy efficient. Also the buildings themselves are often beautiful. Perhaps you will find some ideas from among these pages to help with your own designs.

Kelly Hart is your host here at greenhomebuilding.com , and has been involved with green building concepts for much of his life. Kelly spent many years as a professional remodeler, during which time he became acquainted with many of the pitfalls of conventional construction. He has also worked in various fields of communication media, including still photography, cinematography, animation (he has a patent for a process for making animated films), video production and now website development. One of the more recent video programs that he produced is A Sampler of Alternative Homes: Approaching Sustainable Architecture , which explores a whole range of building concepts that are earth friendly. Kelly is knowledgeable about both simple design concepts and more complex technological aspects of home building that enhance sustainable living. He has even designed and built a solar-electric car that he drives around his neighborhood. Kelly, and his wife Rosana, live in the earthbag/papercrete

As "consumers" we are frequently confronted with life style decisions that can impact our environment. There are a few choices in this life that can make a big difference in what the quality of life will be for those who follow us. Going with the flow of our culture is hard to avoid, and unfortunately the flow is not in the right direction for evolving a sustainable future. One of the most momentous choices that any of us will make is the kind of house we live in. I have come up with a list of thirteen principles of sustainable architecture (listed as links on the left) that can guide you in your housing choices.