Construction Management – Watch for Green Washing

Building a Home? Find Green not Greenwashing – an article posted today at Chelsea Green (www.chelseagreen.com). I thought I would share this article as it talks about both building green and the challenges of using concrete and ICF. We weighed the options of a stick-frame-construction vrs using concrete. We also have had many people voice their concern over the manufacturing of concrete. We are optomistic that our house will be standing long after we leave and will continue to use less resourses for heating and energy into the future.

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.

Read the rest of the article, Building a Home? Find Green.

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2. Slash heating bills by building with ICF
3. Organic Concrete
4. Watch eco-friendy videos free online
5. Why build with insulated concrete forms?
6. Concrete Exterior Homes offer security with traditional look
7. Breaking the process – Finding green construction innovation
8. How to go green without seeing red
9. Framing! Site Inspection – January 29th, 2006
10. The pull of energy – building homes with concrete

Tagged as: Building, building a home, building material, concrete blocks, Construction Management, extreme longevity, green, heating and cooling, high volume, insulated concrete forms, life cycle, Ramsay, raw materials, renewable resource, tracts, whole life