Tag: Sustainable

Swiss company Litrax looks to put the green back in bamboo.

Felix Stutz has no illusions about the nature of traditional bamboo.

Years ago, we said: This is not right. Youre labeling something natural which is not natural. It is filled with chemicals, he said.

ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2009) Food production of modern human societies is mostly based on large-scale monoculture crops, but it now appears that advanced insect societies have the same practice.
Our societies took just ten thousand years of (mainly cultural) evolution to adopt this habit and we are far from convinced that it is sustainable. Farming ants and termites had tens of millions of years to evolve their fungus farming systems and here monocultures are apparently evolutionary stable.

In the context of sustainable housing Allen Associates has developed projects with renewable energy systems including wood heating. The Toronto winning design of the CMHC (Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation) Healthy House Competition highlighted the need for a wood fired integrated appliance which combines space and domestic water heating, cooking and electricity production. This device will service reduced thermal and electrical end uses and complement photovoltaic electricity generation and solar thermal water heating.

This paper discusses environmentally sustainable housing principles and illustrates their application with three built projects. All projects used a major wood heating appliance with integrated domestic water heating.