Greenhomebuilding.com
E-zine #2 May 4, 2002
Contents
*Site News
*General News
*Amazing Earthbag Experiment
*An Opportunity to Help
*Book of the Month
*Site of the
Month
*General and Unsubscribe Information
Greenhomebuilding.com
E-zine is a monthly opt-in email publication for people who are
interested in sustainable architecture and alternative or natural building. It
is written by Kelly Hart, the host of http://www.greenhomebuilding.com
..
Site News
Greenhomebuilding.com is now averaging about
300 visitors each day, which means that somebody logs on just about every five
minutes! Considering this, I've been a bit surprised at how few people are
actually taking advantage of the tremendous resource of the "Ask the Experts" page. This page offers you the opportunity
to ask questions of a very distinguished panel of experts, ranging over
virtually every topic presented at greenhomebuilding.com.
You can ask questions by going to http://www.greenhomebuilding.com/ask_the_experts.htm .
General
News
There is good
news from Denmark; they might be considered a model for how to combine
industrialization with benign ecological practice. Denmark generates 13
percent of its electricity from wind and plans to raise that figure to nearly 50
percent by 2030. Because wind power doesn't release carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, this is helping Denmark meet its Kyoto treaty commitments to slash
greenhouse gas emissions by 21 percent from 1990 levels by 2010.
In Copenhagen some 2,000 free bicycles are available
in public squares and train stations, while a national tax on automobile
purchases more than triples the cost of buying a car.
Across the country, farm manure and kitchen garbage are
delivered to biogas plants producing fertilizer and a methane fuel that burns
cleanly at power plants.
In Kalundborg, waste heat from the local power plant is
put to use to warm fish farms and most of the area's homes and businesses, while
excess steam is piped to an oil refinery and a biotech company. Air scrubbers on
the power plant's smokestack turn sulfur dioxide into gypsum which is then sold
to a factory that dries it in kilns, fired by flare gas piped over from the
refinery, and turns it into wallboard. The power station uses the refinery's
wastewater to keep the scrubbers working. Fly ash from the power station is sold
to cement plants or firms that extract valuable metals from the
wastes.
Sludge from the county wastewater treatment plant is sold
to a local soil cleanup company, which uses it to grow the pollution-eating
bacteria that clean contaminated soil brought there from across Denmark.
In the process, the various firms all have saved money
while reducing pollution and slashing consumption of water, energy and other
resources. By investing approximately $75 million to date in this "industrial
symbiosis," the firms estimate they are saving about $15 million collectively a
year in operating costs. (Excerpted from an article for the San
Francisco Chronicle by Colin Woodard.)
Amazing Earthbag Experiment
I was recently given the opportunity to help
demolish an earthbag house project that had been started in our community. The
owner/builder had sold the property and the new owner wanted the land cleared.
At first the owner wanted to have heavy excavation equipment come in and just
push it all over and haul the debris away. I offered to
help carefully take the structure apart so we could recycle some
of the materials and learn something about how easy it might be to tear down
such construction.
There were three domes to be removed, two of them
connected and the third freestanding. These domes were constructed
similarly to my house: polypropylene earthbags were filled with crushed volcanic
rock (scoria); the courses of bags had barbed wire between them and the
bags were tied to each other with poly baling twine. Papercrete was
applied to both the interior and exterior surfaces. Additionally,
rebar stakes had been driven through several courses of bags in many
locations.
The freestanding dome was a rather lacy affair,
almost a gazebo, with four arched openings and several circular windows. The
builder had experienced difficulty in erecting this delicate building (it had
collapsed several times in the process), so at my suggestion he had wrapped the
columns between the arches with two-inch chicken wire mesh before applying the
papercrete, in order to stiffen the building and make it stronger.
This gazebo-like dome was built on a layer of
about ten inches of scoria, which I started to collect for reuse. As I was
digging around the base of the structure, it occurred to me that an interesting
experiment would be to dig out from under a section of the wall and see how much
could be undercut before the wall began to collapse. The section of wall I chose
to undermine was about 15 feet long, between two arched openings. I dug
alternately from one side and then the other, completely removing the scoria
from underneath the wall. Like my house, there was no other foundation to this
building.
After I had cleared about a yard in from both
sides, with nothing happening to the building, I was rather surprised. After
all, this is just bags of rock stacked on top of each other, amounting to an
estimated four tons of material. There were no cracks in the plaster nor sagging
of the wall.
I dashed home to get a camera to record the
events, and continued undermining the wall, being careful to keep out of
harm's way if it should suddenly collapse. The more I dug the more amazed I
became. When the wall section was precariously balanced on about one foot of
scoria in the middle of the wall, and nothing had happened except one bag had
fallen out onto the ground below, I snapped the picture that can be seen here:
http://www.greenhomebuilding.com/earthbag.htm#Matts .
If anyone had any doubts about the strength and
integrity of this system of building, this experiment should allay those
concerns. Earthbag building of this sort can be STRONG! Eventually, as I
continued to dig out from under the wall, it simply began to hinge downward from
a point about ten feet up, above the arches. The wall itself showed no signs of
falling apart. In fact when the owner tried to break it apart with an axe and a
sledge hammer, he finally gave up and decided to have the backhoe tear into it!
The fact that it was surrounded with the wire mesh and that he had used twice
the amount of Portland cement as usual in the papercrete mix are factors
contributing to the phenomenal strength.
An Opportunity to
Help
There is an opportunity to help complete the construction
of the first papercrete clinic being built on the Navajo Reservation in Arizona.
In June, they are planning for the roof to go up, and are still in need
of input from carpenters experienced in roofing, who can help with this crucial
phase.
As soon as the roof is up, it will be time for the stucco, and the finishing
work. There is a need for volunteers most of the time from now until July13th,
with specific work parties taking place for each phase. For information about
the May 20-30 work party, please call John at 702-610-5441 or email him at stormgentle@yahoo.com . For more
information about the Papercrete clinic project, or Indigenous Peoples Project,
email at ipp@gaiasophia.com or call
Karen at 541-482-9266.
Book of the Month
The Natural House: A Complete Guide to Healthy, Energy Efficient,
Environmental Homes by Daniel D. Chiras, 2000. This is a
very comprehensive survey of the principles of sustainable architecture, and a
look at many techniques of natural building, including log, stone, cob,
cordwood, adobe, rammed earth, straw bales, papercrete, earthbags, bamboo, cast
earth, light straw-clay, rammed earth tires, and hybrid homes. Each chapter ends
with a list of the pros and cons of the technique under discussion and a frank
discussion of construction costs. It covers site selection and green building
materials---products you use to finish your home, materials and finishes that
are healthy and gentle on the environment. A comprehensive resource guide
is included.
Daniel Chiras says, "This book is about creating sustainable shelter. That
is, it's about creating a dream home that is healthy, kind to Mother Earth,
nourishing to the soul, and easy on the pocket book---not an environmental and
economic nightmare."
Site of the Month
www.planetdrum.org represents the
original voice of the Bioregional movement. I have known about the Planet
Drum Foundation since its inception in the early 1970's. Peter Berg, the
founder and current bioregional guru, and I co-produced "Nowreal," a film
about the San Francisco Diggers, back in 1968. Peter now spends part of each
year in Ecuador, helping to establish ecological practices in a small city along
the coast.
Peter's definition of bioregion is: "a life-place which has unique flora,
fauna, soils, weather and topology; all these become the basis of boundaries.
Watersheds are the organizing principals of bioregions. You know, most little
towns planned their water supply before they gained their present populations;
and now they plan how they are going to divert a river to support that new
suburb. That's the wrong way to go. You have to decide how to get people who
already live in that watershed to live in such a way so the watershed won't die.
Because if the watershed dies it's like losing the arteries or fingers: which is
the problem we've had with this frontier psychotic Western civilization of these
last 400 years."
"There is a need for a cultural concept of a "bioregion." If the biosphere is
the issue then how one lives in place (because places are the anatomical parts
of the biosphere) becomes a primary consideration. Your head can be any place,
but your feet have to be some place. Bioregion is a cultural concept, really,
not a scientific concept. It should be up to the people to define a bioregion
rather than having it come down from the institutional scientific elite. There
should be a planetarian feel to it: that we will become reinhabitory people and
we will begin redefining our locations in planetary terms for ourselves. The
goal of reinhabitation in a bioregion would be to succeed at living in place, a
future primitive planetarian mode."
General and Unsubsrcibe information
Greenhomebuilding.com
E-zine is copyright Hartworks, Inc. 2002. Please feel free to
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Kelly Hart