During that straw bale building workshop [0] a few weeks back, a guest speaker who also happens to be my architect [0], Brian Fuentes [1], talked about trying to work with green methods ... He said something like “Building with straw bales isn’t just for the hippies and freaks anymore.”
Which is to say, more and more people are seeing the value and practicality of building with this cheap, plentiful, natural, super-insulating, user-friendly material. A 45,000 square foot public building [2] in Santa Clarita, is one of the first straw-bale buildings to be LEED [3]-certified; Ridge Vineyards [4], also in California, built their tasting, storage and barreling rooms [5] out of bales; even in Aspen, CO, the locus of conspicuous consumption in the American West, straw bale homes [6] are popping up.
All of which is righteous and radical; green building huzzah! But on the business end of things, where I’m sitting right now, I’m dealing with a couple of pitfalls the green building biz has yet to overcome.
I’ve already bitched [6] about how none of the suppliers and subcontractors I need for this project are calling me back. [The guy I have sort-of working for me as my sort-of general contractor (translation: I pay him to tell me what to do next) says big suppliers don’t put a whole lot of care into small projects like mine. Sweet.]
But another issue is that a few key supplies that I need — like my recycled-polystyrene-and-cement foundation blocks [6] — aren’t quite standard building supplies, at least not yet. Which is to say, I can’t just pop down to WhopperMart [7] and pick up what I need; I have to hunt around for a specialized supplier and wait til he calls me back and see if he has my stuff in stock and most likely special order what I need which might have to be custom fabricated specifically for my project and before you know it it’s April 2010.
I may be wrong, or just barking up all the wrong trees, but to me it looks like a lot of these materials and their suppliers are still going through a bit of market Darwinism: There are an awful lot of teeny tiny players with weak supply chains and as-yet-unformed sales teams. No dominant monster [8] (or even ambitious proto-mammal [9]) has emerged as the place to call for your foundation blocks. Or your cork floors.
Case in point: We need to put new floors in one of the rented apartments attached to our house, and we were looking for the greenest alternative. (And no, it ain’t bamboo [9], people.) So we found a place here in Boulder [10] that sold cork flooring and carpeting made from recycled plastic bottles, called them up and asked if we could come take a look at their stuff. Sure, they said. Only thing is, they have no showroom, so would we mind coming to their apartment to check it out?
Don’t get me wrong. The grassroots groove is right on. I’m glad the movement is starting to really move. I don’t mind coming to your apartment to see your cork floors. I’m willing to take the time to find my foundation blocks. But that’s me. I’m one of the freaks [10]. But if I think it’s a pain in the apple to work all this out, what’s Joe Average gonna think?