Green or Greed?
Are you looking to buy a “green-built” house? Does this sign entice you? Well, don’t be fooled. Slapping “green-built” on a new housing project is the marketing tool of choice for shady real-estate developers these days. These condos just down the street from my house are about as green as a slimmed-down Hummer.
The builders started off with a very noble and environmentally friendly idea. They tore down the old inefficient condos that once sat on that lot with the idea of building fancy new condos on the existing concrete slabs. But then a problem arose. The old slabs were falling apart and didn’t pass inspection so the builders had to bust them up and start anew, which required the use of an unfathomable amount of cement. I don’t want to rehash the argument against our society’s overuse of cement here. Suffice it to say that it is one of the most energy-intensive materials around while its production is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
In my book, as soon as the builders poured new slabs they should have lost any right to be called green-builders, but if you’re still not convinced just take a look at the industrial dumpster the builders are using. I’ve watched it get filled and emptied at least three times in the past several months. While that might be standard practice in the American construction and demolition industries, which produce 140 million tons of waste each year, over a third of the country’s entire solid-waste stream, true green builders pride themselves on producing as little waste as possible.
And then there’s their use of Tyvek, a Dupont-produced “housewrap” that is one of the most controversial building materials on the market today. While it does make a house “tighter” and therefore more energy efficient, it has also been linked to mold growth and rot inside of walls. Its long-term impact on the environment is also largely unknown. Does it break down in a landfill? Can it be recycled? No one knows for sure because the material hasn’t been around long enough for its life cycle to be studied in the real world.
This is not an isolated case. This is trend. People are growing increasingly aware of the detrimental impact our houses have on the environment and so more and more are happy to pay a little extra for a green-built house. Just make sure that if you’re the one doing the buying that the house was made green by designers and not by a marketing department.
Tags: cement, green-built, landfill, Tyvek
July 29th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
i had no idea that cement mixers were such nefarious dealers of death.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:21 am
It’s a tricky issue. Cement production has gotten much better over the years and there are things like fly ash, a waste product, that can be added to it to make its production a bit more benign. But it still requires a ridiculous amount of energy to make and transport ,and both the making and transportation emit a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide. Cement is a wonderful product that can be used to perform functions no other material could do like making footers. My problem with it is its overuse. For example, concrete parking lots and sidewalks. Couldn’t we use a better, less harmful, material like gravel in these situations? I don’t expect or want cement to be outlawed. I just want people to know how harmful it is and to start thinking about other options.