(Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)
Production of cement, the raw material in concrete, accounts for between 7 and 8 percent of global carbon emissions today, due both to the fossil fuels used in its high-heat production and the chemical composition of the raw materials and processes that make it.
Source: Major construction firms team up to get the carbon out… | Canary Media
Alan Schein / Getty Images
Reusing old wood, windows, metal, brick, and even concrete seems like a no-brainer (even some animals recycle used materials!), but it sadly doesn’t happen as often as it should. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, between 230 million and 530 million tons of construction and demolition waste are produced yearly in the United States.
Revitalizing urban environments with consciously repurposed materials and more practices are the brand’s ethos.
Source: How Sustainability Leader 1 Hotels Chose Its New Locations
Nzambi Matee, a 30-year-old who quit her job in oil and gas to work on her passion full-time, has created a lightweight and low-cost building material that is made of recycled plastic with sand to make bricks that are stronger than concrete material.
Using reclaimed materials and products can give your home a rustic charm while using existing items, keeping materials out of the landfill and reducing the demand for new products and the waste created when they’re made.
Source: 4 ways to revamp your interior design with sustainable products – Times of Oman
Transport trucks and loggers gather around fallen trees in the Chocó. (Photo courtesy of Brian Rodgers)
Some of Home Depot’s plywood is allegedly sourced from vulnerable forests in Ecuador’s Chocó region and the Brazilian Cerrado, and conservationists and investors have pressured the home improvement giant to clean up its supply chain.
Source: Investors force Home Depot to review wood-sourcing policy over logging concerns
Thomas Dambo’s troll sculptures have been exhibited all over the world. Pictured: his piece ‘The six forgotten giants – little Tilde’ based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Credit: Lars W. Jensen
Based in Denmark, Dambo is the world’s most prominent ‘recycle artist,’ best known for giant troll sculptures all made from reclaimed materials.
Source: Big tourism boost for Mandurah as it welcomes Australian-first sculpture trail | Kalgoorlie Miner
Each piece of wood is marked with a unique QR codeDaniel Winkler/ETH Zurich
It’s a sad fact that even though our forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, new wooden structures are typically made of all-new wood. A special computer system could help change that, by facilitating the use of wood reclaimed from existing buildings.
Source: Computer system designs structures based on available reclaimed wood
The project would allow unlimited mechanized cutting and removal of live and dead trees of any age up to 2 feet in diameter and an undisclosed number of trees up to 5 feet in diameter, as well as the destruction of chaparral across 755 acres.
Unique Homestays owner ‘Mouse’ shares the story of creation behind her two chocolate-box holiday rentals, Inkwell cottage and Filly Island.
Nguyen Ngoc Anh, 36, who was an illegal logger turned forest protector poses at Phong Nha National Park, Quang Binh province, Vietnam, April 8, 2022. REUTERS/Hoang Trung
Now, Ngoc Anh is one of 250 former loggers trained by an adventure tourism company to lead mostly foreign tourists through jungles and into some of the world’s largest cave systems in the Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site.
Source: Illegal loggers in Vietnam train as jungle tour guides | Reuters
An old-growth redwood tree named “Father of the Forest” in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California in August 2020. Some trees in the park have been standing for 2,000 years.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
“It’s a very good start on the things that we’ve been asking for,” said Kirin Kennedy, director of people and nature policy at the Sierra Club, one of the members of that coalition. She said her group is not necessarily calling for a moratorium on logging old-growth trees, but for a science-based approach to managing them. “We want to protect old trees, but we also want to make sure communities are protected,” said Kennedy.
Source: Biden executive action aims to preserve old-growth trees : NPR
The 100-meter-tall construction will follow a system which replaces a concrete core with wood. Credit: Aesthetica Studio/Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects
The project joins other architectural ventures looking to prove that timber can be used as a sustainable alternative to concrete and steel when building high-rises.
Source: World’s tallest timber residential tower to be built – CNN Style
The roof of ZGF’s new terminal for Portland International Airport will be constructed from locally sourced cross-laminated timber. Credit: Port of Portland
“Acting at scale is so eminently possible,” Lindsay Baker told me. She is the CEO of the International Living Futures Institute (IFLI), which runs the Living Building Challenge, an extraordinarily rigorous certification program that has pushed the building industry to achieve energy use reductions deemed all but impossible a few years ago.
Source: Net Zero Buildings Could Bring an Energy Savings Boom – Bloomberg
© Luna Wilds
Luna Wilds, an “off-grid” spa just outside Brighton in East Sussex, is a new retreat built with reclaimed materials, says Jane Dunford in The Guardian.
Ten companies focused on reducing carbon emissions and waste, preserving water and protecting ecosystems have been selected to take part in Microsoft’s AI for Environmental Sustainability Accelerator programme.
Yes Make is helping design London’s public spaces with reclaimed materials from other developments
Source: Microsoft selects AI start-ups to accelerate progress on environmental sustainability
Ecologist Michelle Connolly standing among cedar trees in the inland temperate rainforest near Penny, BC. The inland rainforest gets much less attention from environmental groups than BC’s coastal rainforests, but it is an even rarer ecosystem.
In 2021, Connolly co-authored a peer-reviewed study that found that BC’s inland rainforest — which once totaled over 1.3 million hectares — was endangered, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature criteria, and could experience ecological collapse within a decade if current logging rates continue. The study found that 95 percent of its core habitat, forest located more than 100 meters from a road, had been lost since 1970. “We’re fighting over the last pieces,” Connolly says.
The construction industry is responsible for over a tenth of the world’s man-made carbon emissions, with concrete being the biggest culprit. How can we continue to build, without it costing the earth?
Logs are stacked high in this aerial view of Viking Lumber’s sawmill in Klawock, Alaska. SEAKdrones LLC
Land exchanges have allowed lawmakers in Washington, D.C. to bypass the Roadless Rule and other environmental protections and transfer ownership of thousands of acres of old-growth Tongass National Forest, opening the land up for logging.
Source: A logging loophole is clear-cutting the Tongass National Forest – Grist | Grist
“[Regular people are] competing against the largest private equity firm in the world to purchase a home,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “In fact, companies like Blackstone, Zillow and Bedrock are buying up to 15 percent of available homes – but what I find interesting here is that they’re purchasing them in minority and low-income neighborhoods specifically.”
Source: Ocasio-Cortez Digs Into Private Equity for Buying Houses and Jacking Up Rents
“We see the tree cover being swapped out for impervious cover, which means when we look at the photographs, what was there is now replaced with a parking lot or a building,” Nowak said.
Source: US cities are losing 36 million trees a year. Here’s why it matters and how you can stop it | CNN
Core-shell architecture of a nanofibrillar PEDOT-coated brick electrode lights up a green LED. Credit: D’Arcy Laboratory, Department of Chemistry, Washington University in St. Louis
The bricks are powerful enough to illuminate an LED light bulb and cost only about $3 to make.
Source: Bricks Can Be Turned into Batteries – Scientific American
COURTESY CAROLINE PERRON PHOTOGRAPHIES — Three years in the making, the patented machine cleans 99 per cent of a brick through a process involving a concrete grinder that allows the cleaning of the brick extremities.
Chifa says Maçonnerie Gratton calculates the brick recycling machine can eliminate up to 5.9 tonnes of CO2 emissions in the restoration of a 1,000 square foot brick wall. “Throughout Quebec and Canada this means a lot because we are all about bricks,” Stoia says. The recycling machine “sets the tone” for municipalities and the province to consider legislation on the reuse of construction materials. She adds recycling bricks for reuse helps to conserve Quebec’s architectural past.
Source: Brique-Recyc gives old bricks new life with innovative quick cleaning machine – constructconnect.com
The Plaza Hotel in New York City.Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto via Getty Images file
That’s because there is very little the government can do to find out who owns what real estate in the U.S., which has become a “destination of choice” for money launderers throughout the world, said Louise Shelley, the director of the transnational crime and corruption center at George Mason University, who has been an expert witness about how Russian money is laundered through real estate.
Source: ‘It’s a complete black box’: Russian oligarchs pour money into U.S. real estate market
Aerial image of high elevation forests in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, which is part of the southern Blue Ridge eco-region that NC State researchers studied. The image was created using data from the National Agriculture Imagery Program. Credit: Katie McQuillan, NC State.
“We think that increasing temperatures are behind greater water use during droughts,” McQuillan said. “When it’s hotter, forests use more water to keep themselves cool.”
Source: During droughts, thirstier mountain forests could mean less water downstream
Sand is everywhere and in everything. Of course, that means there’s a pretty nasty underground sand business run by some pretty nasty sand people, proving once again that there’s no resource too tiny for humans to kill each other and the planet over.
A log truck near Tillamook, Ore., in an undated file photo. Amelia Templeton
Gutman countered that logging revenue isn’t the only permanent value that forestland can provide and that recreation, habitat protection, flood stabilization and other land uses also contribute. “It provides economic value even if the land doesn’t generate revenue,” Gutman told the court. “That’s not just some 21st-century notion being superimposed on statutes from the 1940s.”
Source: $1 billion timber case goes before Oregon Court of Appeals – OPB
The monetary value of riverbed material was realised as the world moved towards concrete construction. Pathak says, “As the country moved towards urbanisation, demand for the RBM [riverbed material] for construction activities exploded.”
Source: The Indian river being hollowed by mining for concrete
The construction industry is notoriously fragmented, with different sub-contractors often designing and developing parts of buildings without interacting with one another, which means opportunities to reuse materials are missed. However, if each component had a digital ‘passport’ which clearly defined its material composition alongside possible reuse options, materials would be far less likely to be wasted.
Source: Building a world free from waste and pollution | by Ellen MacArthur Foundation | Circulate | Medium
Photo credit: Hani Amir via Flickr
Leaving older forests to their own devices means safeguarding vital wildlife habitats and healthy ecosystems that fortify our planet’s overall climate stability. If that isn’t reason enough to keep our remaining big trees standing, then perhaps this will tip the scale: Old-growth forests store vast amounts of carbon.
Source: What makes older forests so special? | Environment America
One of these goals relates to ROCKWOOL’s offering reclaimed materials services, Rockcycle. The service facilitates the take back of ROCKWOOL stone wool products from construction or demolition sites and ensures the material is reused or recycled, helping to address the challenge of construction waste accounting for more than one-third of all solid waste globally.
The prominent factor favoring the growth of the global market is the increasing demand for reclaimed lumbers in the building & construction industry, especially in commercial and residential constructions. As per MRFR analysis, the expenditure in the global construction industry was USD 11.2 trillion in 2019and is projected to rise at a healthy rate year-on-year, to reach USD over 14 trillion by the end of 2027.
Sanitized thinned site on the Deschutes National Forest has removed most of the carbon (and wildlife habitat) which is subsequently emitted as Greenhouse Gases into the atmosphere. Photo George Wuerthner
For instance, one study estimates that logging in the United States releases five times the carbon as wildfire, bark beetles, wind thrown, land use conservations, and drought combined.
Source: Logging Contributes to Climate Warming | The Wildlife News
This edition draws on five years of the Circularity Gap Report analysis to show the power of the circular economy to equitably fulfil our global needs and wants, but with radically fewer materials and emissions.
Source: CGR 2022
Trucks haul away illegally cut timber from a protected forest area in Cambodia in an undated photo. Credit: Amnesty International/Private
Other community members in Prey Lang said that illegal loggers sometimes offered to buy resin trees from them and that they felt that they had to accept whatever payment was offered because the loggers would cut down the trees regardless.
Source: ‘Rampant’ illegal logging in Cambodia an ‘existential’ threat to Indigenous people — Radio Free Asia
Manhattan’s skyscrapers aren’t really built for people anymore.
CREDIT: EMILY GREEN; SQFT NASHVILLE
“We have used materials in every room, but the main area seems to be the kitchen,” she says, noting walnut as a popular choice for kitchen island tops. “As this is the main room people always seem to congregate in, reclaimed materials serve as conversation starters.”
For example, cities are beginning to adopt materials reclamation policies. These laws require certain buildings to be deconstructed rather than demolished so valuable materials can be reused. Reclaimed products are helpful for the environment and allow construction companies to dodge supply chain shortages, particularly for lumber. For example, the Kendeda Building at the Georgia Institute of Technology was built in part using 25,000 linear feet of reclaimed lumber from film sets around Atlanta.
Source: New Home Construction Expectations for 2022 – Appraisal Buzz
(Image credit: Leanne Ford)
This minimal reimagining of the farmhouse kitchen celebrates exposed trusses and beams, abundant wood, soaring ceilings and reclaimed materials.
[Photo: courtesy Lanoba Design]
But in a world where Americans throw out more than 12 million tons of furniture per year, it has also championed circular design by breathing new life in Danish castoffs, carving itself a cozy (dare I say hygge) niche in an oversaturated furniture market.
Source: Danes don’t want their vintage furniture. This company has upcycled 10
Illustration by Javier Jaén
Kolomoisky is alleged to have bought it, along with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of other midwestern properties, as part of a money-laundering operation. According to Michel, who said that Kolomoisky declined to comment on any of the allegations in the book, the oligarch needed to move cash that had been obtained illegally into something “real,” in order to hide its origins (and perhaps use it as collateral for legitimate loans).
Source: Review: ‘American Kleptocracy’ and ‘Kleptopia’ – The Atlantic
How the sunlight-controlled CO2 separation installation works. Credit: Shiming Zhang, Renmin University of China.
In a study published in the journal Green Energy & Environment, a group of researchers from Renmin University of China propose a new method to capture CO2 using sunlight as the energy source and modified sawdust as the CO2 absorbent
Source: Scientists use sunlight and modified sawdust to reversibly capture carbon dioxide
An old building is a kind of ever-morphing history book; chapters are caught between layers of paint and architectural features offer clues about the people who lived in them long ago. In this seminar, join Lauren Northup for a cross-disciplinary approach to unlocking the language of buildings, drawing from architectural history, microscopy, historic preservation, and archaeology.
Source: When Walls Talk: Decoding a Building’s History With Lauren Northup – Atlas Obscura Experiences
For reference, the current “tallest tree” in the world is said to be Hyperion at roughly 380 feet tall. Today we will focus on trees (with measurements given) from the 1800’s that stood over 400 feet tall (and take a look at their unique photographs).
The building’s facades are made using timber offcuts and approximately 700 windows donated by the community. The fixtures were measured, repaired and assigned a position using computer software, creating a seemingly random yet precise patchwork effect.
Source: Kamikatsu Zero Waste Center is built using waste materials
‘Body shops operate in the shadows, with no accountability,’ one union leader said. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock
It’s not an idle threat: New York imprisoned individuals nearly three times the national average in 2019 for technical parole violations, consisting of 40% of all individuals admitted to prisons in the state. Body shop employers exploit those work requirements to pay parolees’ low wages under unsafe working conditions.
Images showing how trees grow more strongly when planted in diverse forests, compare the size of the trees at 11-years-old. The tree on the right was planted in a more diverse area. Author provided
There is no human technology that can compete with forests for take-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and its storage. Darwin’s idea of growing lots of different plants together to increase the overall yield is now being explored by leading academics, who research forests and climate change.
Source: A 150-year-old note from Charles Darwin is inspiring a change in the way forests are planted
Brad Day and his neighbors in California’s Sonoma Valley have noticed a real estate startup is turning houses in their community into limited liability corporations. A group has formed to oppose the company’s moves. Day’s favorite sign reads, “The Pacaso house is the big one on the right with no soul.”
Brad Day
The company was co-founded by a Napa resident, and it converts houses into LLCs. Pacaso then sells shares of these corporate houses to multiple investors. Gardner Googled Pacaso, and, sure enough, the house on their cul-de-sac was on its website. The company had named the house “Chardonnay” and was now selling investors the chance to buy a one-eighth share of it for $606,000.
Source: Pacaso Is Turning Houses Into Corporations : Planet Money : NPR
In the 12 years since its launch, ThredUp has garnered a whopping total of 1.34 million active sellers, making its reach pretty damn high. But its impact on you — and on a much grander scale — the future of the planet is even greater than we previously thought, thanks to its Resale as a Service (or RaaS), a program that encourages retail partners to adopt a resale-first mindset and move towards a circular economy.
Source: Will ThredUp’s Retail Partnerships Really Achieve a Circular Economy?
Anchorage, Alaska, resident Hans Dow built his own sawmill and began milling his own boards after lumber prices skyrocketed over the past year.
Emily Schwing for NPR
“You can’t pay these kind of prices,” he says. “It’s like going to the grocery store and spending $200 and leaving with one bag of groceries.”
