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11 green building materials that are way better than concrete

08/02/2016 under Architecture, carousel showcase, Features, Green Building, Green Materials 2

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by Emily Peckenham

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Concrete is a material that quite literally holds our cities together. From homes and apartment
buildings to bridges, viaducts, and sidewalks, this ubiquitous gray material's importance to
modern urban life is undeniable. But you might have heard that it also has a dirty secret: the
production of commercial concrete materials releases tons of the greenhouse gas carbon
dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere each year, contributing to the calamity that is climate
change. But it doesn't have to be that way. We have collated 11 green building materials that
offer alternatives to concrete, and a lower environmental impact.
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1. Straw Bales
Rather than relying on new research and technology, straw bale building hearkens back to the
days when homes were built from natural, locally-occurring materials. Straw bales are used to
create a home’s walls inside of a frame, replacing other building materials such as concrete,
wood, gypsum, plaster, fiberglass, or stone. When properly sealed, straw bales  naturally
provide very high levels of insulation for a hot or cold climate, and are not only affordable but
sustainable as straw is a rapidly renewable resource.
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2. Grasscrete
As its name might indicate, grasscrete is a method of laying concrete flooring, walkways,
sidewalks, and driveways in such a manner that there are open patterns allowing grass or other
flora to grow. While this provides the benefit of reducing concrete usage overall, there’s also
another important perk — improved stormwater absorption and drainage.
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3. Rammed Earth
What’s more natural than the dirt under your feet? In fact, walls that have a similar feel to
concrete can actually be created with nothing more than dirt tamped down very tightly in
wooden forms. Rammed earth is a technology that has been used by human civilization for
thousands of years, and can last a very long time. Modern rammed earth buildings can be
made safer by use of rebar or bamboo, and mechanical tampers reduce the amount of labor
required to create sturdy walls.
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4. HempCrete
HempCrete is just what it sounds like – a concrete like material created from the woody inner
fibers of the hemp plant. The hemp fibers are bound with lime to create concrete-like shapes
that are strong and light. HempCrete blocks are super-lightweight, which can also dramatically
reduce the energy used to transport the blocks, and hemp itself is a fast-growing, renewable
resource.
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®Flickr/Carolina Zuluaga

5. Bamboo
Bamboo might seem trendy, but it has actually been a locally-sourced building material in
some regions of the world for millennia. What makes bamboo such a promising building
material for modern buildings is its combination of tensile strength, light weight, and fast-
growing renewable nature. Used for framing buildings and shelters, bamboo can replace
expensive and heavy imported materials and provide an alternative to concrete and rebar
construction, especially in difficult-to reach areas, post-disaster rebuilding, and low-income
areas with access to natural locally-sourced bamboo. Ad closed by
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6. Recycled Plastic
Instead of mining, extracting, and milling new components, researchers are creating concrete
that includes ground up recycled plastics and trash, which not only reduces greenhouse gas
emissions, but reduces weight and provides a new use for landfill-clogging plastic waste.
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7. Wood
Plain old wood still retains many advantages over more industrial building materials like
concrete or steel. Not only do trees absorb CO2 as they grow, they require much less energy-
intensive methods to process into construction products. Properly managed forests are also
renewable and can ensure a biodiverse habitat.

RELATED: Energy efficient timber cabin in Norway

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8. Mycelium
Mycelium is a crazy futuristic building material that’s actually totally natural – it comprises the
root structure of fungi and mushrooms. Mycelium can be encouraged to grow around a
composite of other natural materials, like ground up straw, in molds or forms, then air-dried to
create lightweight and strong bricks or other shapes.
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9. Ferrock
Ferrock is a new material being researched that uses recycled materials including steel dust
from the steel industry to create a concrete-like building material that is even stronger than
concrete. What’s more, this unique material actually absorbs and traps carbon dioxide as part
of its drying and hardening process – making it not only less CO2 intensive than traditional
concrete, but actually carbon neutral.
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10. AshCrete
AshCrete is a concrete alternative that uses fly ash instead of traditional cement.  By using fly
ash, a by-product of burning coal, 97 percent of traditional components in concrete can be
replaced with recycled material.
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11. Timbercrete
Timbercrete is an interesting building material made of sawdust and concrete mixed together.
Since it is lighter than concrete, it reduces transportation emissions, and the sawdust both
reuses a waste product and replaces some of the energy-intensive components of traditional
concrete. Timbercrete can be formed into traditional shapes such as blocks, bricks, and pavers.
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Concrete Made with Biofuel Waste is Strong,

Durable, and Has a Lower Carbon Footprint
ARCHITECTURE

03/20/2013 under Architecture, Green Building, Innovation, Recycled Materials, Sustainable Materials

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 by Morgana Matus
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In the crusade to cut global CO2 emissions, we tend look to power plants, cars, and
manufacturing. Nowadays, our building materials are also garnering attention, and researchers
from Kansas State University have developed a type of concrete made from biofuel waste that
has a lower carbon footprint than conventional concrete. The world uses about 7 billion cubic
meters of the mixture each year, making it the most utilized industrial material after water.
Taking advantage of the byproducts from biofuel production such as corn stover, wheat straw,
and rice straw, the team was able to create a stronger concrete and save excess material from
ending up in the landfill.
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Traditional concrete is made up of aggregate, water, and Portland cement. The researchers at
Kansas State University were able to replace 20 percent Ad closed cement
of portland by with byproducts
from cellulosic ethanol production, a process which Stopuses inedible
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chips, wheat straw, and other agricultural waste. Unlike corn ethanol, the byproducts of which
can be used as cattle feed, cellulosic ethanol creates high-lignin residue that can only be
burned for electricity or thrown away as ash. By adding high-lignin ash to the cement and
water, the team was actually able to increase the strength and durability of the concrete by 32
percent.

“The utilization of this byproduct is important in both concrete materials and biofuel
production,” said Feraidon Ataie, a doctoral candidate in civil engineering. “If you use this in
concrete to increase strength and quality, then you add value to this byproduct rather than just
landfilling it. If you add value to this byproduct, then it is a positive factor for the industry. It can
help to reduce the cost of bioethanol production.”

Seeing as normal concrete accounts for 3 to 8 percent of global CO2 emissions, the newly-
developed formula could not only help cut greenhouse gasses that contribute to global
warming, but it could also help find an avenue for biofuel waste once the industry expands. The
results of the group’s investigations have been published in the 2013 Capitol Graduate
Research Summit in Topeka, and the team was awarded a $210,000 grant from the National
Science Foundation.

+ Kansas State University

Via Clean Technica

Images via Wikicommons users Vesta and Huwmanbeing

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