The Built Environment

Humans rely on the built environment to survive and experience safety. They work across many climate zones otherwise unconducive to modern living and working environments. According to the International Energy Agency 2018 report, which focused on the construction sector:

The buildings and construction sector accounted for 36% of final energy use and 39% of energy and process-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2018, 11% of which resulted from manufacturing building materials and products such as steel, cement, and glass.₁

Overall, buildings account for “about 40% of global energy consumption and about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions.”₂ Traditional light wood framing is the most common residential building type in the United States. It is time to reevaluate our continued investment in this building method, which is inefficient from a resource use and carbon reduction perspective and resulted from the specific need to increase the housing stock during the post-WWII housing boom dramatically. 

While my focused research on climate change has mainly occurred over the past year, I have been interested in alternative building methods and materials for quite some time. I was very attracted to rammed earth construction due to its wide variety of benefits. Still, due to its limited market adoption, I was aware of the high labor costs and building code complications. Codes and standards have come a long way in the past decade as more and more people recognize the benefits of this type of construction. However, there still needs to be more standardization around materials usage and methodology - so long as the structure adheres to load requirements for masonry construction (some exceptions being where adobe buildings have been built and used for a long time). A few years ago, I first heard about CEBs - or Compressed Earth Blocks - and how, by utilizing this method, you could build a structure with many of the benefits of rammed earth while significantly reducing labor costs. This methodology makes sense in markets with high labor costs where the cost of capital (machinery that builds the blocks used for construction) is offset by the reduced cost due to savings in labor costs.

I could write more than twenty pages explaining the various considerations I’ve taken into account, but I will save you some time by recommending two videos discussing rammed earth and CEBs that simplify the concept and explain the basics in broad strokes. This is a shorter video discussing the long history of rammed earth construction and how many of these structures still stand after hundreds or even thousands of years. This video is a presentation from a builder who builds with CEB construction. While it is longer (tip for the uninitiated: you can speed up the playing speed up to x2, or at whatever level you can absorb the information to save time), it highlights many important advantages to this building method from an environmental and energy use - and thus cost-saving - perspective. 

My goal is to build structures using combinations of these two building methods to find the suitable cost/benefit trade-off for the local market and evaluate and improve upon my design methodologies and practices as we build more structures on-site for the subsequent phases of my business model. I’ve designed processes to analyze the soil mixture, test the structural strength and other important attributes of these material blends, and improve their performance over time.  

While this experimentation and development process will take place at my site in Mexico, we can use the R & D conducted here to standardize practices and methods that allow for a consistent product. We can then deploy this method in other markets, adjusting our design protocols to address different capital and labor cost mixes.  

One market I find particularly attractive and ripe for entry is the western United States, where wildfires are a constant and growing threat, especially when combined with high land prices. Several small companies are working in this area. Still, by integrating this process into the other systems of my business model, I can gain strategic advantages through the low cost of experimentation and construction here in Mexico while the business scales up to a point where my broader model can be exported and sold on a franchise basis in the U.S. or elsewhere in the world (more details on that in a later article…)

As a side note:

I’m always available to answer questions, so don’t hesitate to contact me. While I build a financial base to bring on additional employees, my time is short. However, I am passionate and can always take the time to talk to anyone interested in learning more about this topic and/or any other aspects of sustainability. As always, while we scale up and prepare to raise seed funding, we appreciate any donations to help us along the way. If interested, please visit our donation site or the Take Action section of our webpage. We plan to start producing video and audio content shortly to aid in our ability to efficiently educate more people about climate change issues and how we will address them. As we grow our audience, this will serve the dual role of educating more people with accessible content while adding a revenue stream to support us. At the same time, we are actively reaching out to groups for seed money. Any donations you make can go towards this effort to allow me more time to focus my attention where it is needed as we scale up. Thank you, and Happy Holidays!