Some Thoughts on Sustainability in Home Building
Through the trying times of this pandemic, I’ve spent a lot of time at home. Who am I kidding, we’re all spending a lot of time at home. That time, maybe coupled with a glass of wine and some idleness, has led to a lot of contemplation. I’m contemplating my family, our home, and our business. While I’m not a big consumer of media, there is one thing I can’t shake seeing – the images of cities like Los Angeles being clear and blue-skied for lack of pollution. It’s made me think a lot about our industry, “construction” which is one of the primary contributors to pollution and waste around the world, and how it does not have to be the behemoth of toxicity that it is currently.
The average homeowner doesn’t consider where the pieces of their home come from or how they affect global and local industries. I do. When you build the type of homes we do, you think about every aspect. You consider where the lumber comes from and if there is a way to get it more locally. Put simply, most wood is not what any of us would consider local. Yes, some of the wood you might have in your home is local – but it’s likely the minority. The frame of your home is likely made up of lumber from the United States and Canada. Depending on a variety of factors, including year, grade, price, and more. The reality is, most of the materials making up your home have traveled immense distances.
Despite this trend, we think of lumber as a sustainable material – because it is. Lumber can be selectively cut to both aid the forest, as well as the broader ecology of the land. When managed properly, a forest can provide resources to humans as well as other species. Once it’s cut though, it needs to be processed and delivered.
In every case, that lumber travels by way of fossil fuel. Whether it’s primarily on trucks or trains, it’s burning some sort of consumable. Most of us don’t think about that. This is just one of the driving factors behind our business model as a nation. When we mill lumber for projects it might cost a little more or perhaps even the same, even though it is produced here and not in China or Canada. That discrepancy in costs is the result of our fortune as a nation to have access to cheap energy for transportation. This is not an accurate representation of the “cost” of those transports. It is an unfair calculation, discarding the information we have pertaining to the effects of that massive transport machinery. We know the harm is greater than the dollar figures, yet we fail to act on behalf of our own self-interest. We fail to consider the environmental costs of our decisions primarily because we don’t see how those decisions relate to dollar signs. But if we consider what our modern homes would look like without the ability to transport, without the abundance of wood, without the “privilege” of exotic hardwoods gracing our floors when they should be supporting the biodiversity we all rely on in the Amazon, what are we left with? I suspect they’d look more like homes from the time before industrial petroleum manufacturing. They would be made of raw materials, found in the locality of the project. Similar to the homes we, at Corrigan & Klein Artisan Builders, typically build today. This is our mission. To enact meaningful change in how we perceive the connection between our built structures and the environment of our locality and our globe.
Many materials in your average modern home come from great distances. For example, China exports over 12% of the wood products it manufactures, much of it paneling and other processed/engineered wood. While some of these building panels in a home might cost less even though they are made elsewhere, I think about the people involved in that process, the inhumanity of the industry, the toxicity levels to which they are exposed, and the sub-par wages they earn. In contrast, The building style we utilize allows us to get close to the people in our local industry. We know people at every stage in the materials process; from harvesting to processing to sale. They are our friends and neighbors. When I consider the unintended consequences of using engineered and milled products from far-off places I think about all of these factors and my conscious dictates how I act. Local lumber supports local people. That means more of the carbon that’s captured from responsible forestry stays captured, less petroleum is used both in production and transport and reliable jobs are sustained right here at home.
I thoroughly believe that a well-built home is a difficult balancing act. Forget the obvious physics and engineering of making sure a home is structurally sound and literally balances, but more the idea of balancing cost and beauty with environmental impact. We have a tendency to think we are separate from nature, and it doesn’t take much effort to see examples of this in how we pollute our oceans, streams, and lakes. Whether we like it or not, we are part of nature. We can work with it, or against it, but nature will always win. What would our homes and world look like if more of us embraced that idea?
If you look at the longevity of homes built over certain periods, using certain materials, it’s pretty easy to see that the more natural the materials used in a home, the longer it will last. Granite foundations from hundreds of years ago support buildings today, with no signs of wear as long as they were built correctly. Our cultural movement towards fast and inexpensive means granite is used for memorials, countertops, and other smaller items. Try pricing out a granite foundation today – as we moved away from some of these materials, we lost efficiency, making them more expensive. It doesn’t stop with granite, either. Slate roofs, hardwood post, and beam frames, trim, cabinetry– they are all less common today and more expensive in the short term but far less expensive in the long term when you consider their durability and lasting beauty without the need for repair or replacing within a given lifetime.
I don’t expect that we will witness a massive shift towards sustainable building – but I can hope. What I think is more likely is that we will get better about incorporating sustainable practices – using natural and local materials – into our homes. I plan to do what I can to help that happen, even if much of the world chooses to think they are separate from nature.
