New eco-products give hope!

The Dutch Postcode
Lottery and Cradle to Cradle competitions have had some amazing
finalists this year.

The winner this year’s Postcode Lottery Green Challenge was BioMason’s CO₂-free
brick production process, which uses bacteria to ‘grow’ bricks! Can’t wait to
see these around, especially given the amount of embodied energy in a
conventional brick.

The other finalists in the American Cradle to Cradle competition
include:

• Mushroom^R Insulation –
  a green replacement for plastic foams, which combines agricultural
  byproducts with fungal mycelium to ‘grow’ structural rigid insulation
• Bellwether Materials’
  Softbatts – sheep’s wool insulation
• GR Green Building
  Products’ Green Cedar^TM and Green Slate^TM –
  synthetic roofing and cladding materials made from waste limestone and
  recycled plastic milk bottles and shopping bags
• Dutch Design Initiative’s reinforced
  wood wool cement board (pdf link)
• Ecococon’s
  straw panels
• Haplobuilt’s Haploblocks – a small
  scale prefabricated building system (pdf link)
• Ecor^R Universal Construction Panels made
  using waste cellulose fibre.

Great to see such a wide range of ideas being brought forward to help
reduce our embodied energy associated with new builds, extensions and also some
refurbishment.