Best 'green' materials for your home

Best 'green' materials for your home

From the article:

"What's most eco-friendly differs widely, depending on your location, your climate, your project, what's locally available and on the expertise and customs of local craftsmen. It's a good bet, though, that a material is green if it:

* Saves water or energy;

* Replaces toxic chemicals with safe, healthy components;

* Conserves natural resources;

* Is salvaged; or

* Uses recycled material or agricultural waste."

This article does not discuss what are more extreme concepts for greening one's home, such as using geothermal loops for heating and cooling or solar systems on one's roof. Here, we're talking about slightly more subtle, but important building methods and materials to make one's home more environmentally sustainable, to lesson it's negative envirohuman impact.

My take: These are simple solutions. Pollution is caused in both large ways (factories and power plants spewing emissions) and small ones (such as paints that emit volatile organic compounds) but even the so-called, "small," ones matter, because there are millions of, in the case of this article, homes, that do contribute to the total amount of pollution for our society. And if large numbers of people begin to employ smarter building materials that make their homes environmentally sustainable, the positive envirohuman impact could be significant.

Perhaps the best way to look at it as each human as a polluter and that if an entire population manages to individually reduce each "polluter's" total pollution, we would see a positive result of reduced pollution, or at least slowed rates.


Coming up soon, we will attempt to begin defining the concept of "envirohumanism," a word that attempts to grapple with not only the level and amount of change to environmental quality but also how that change might affect society.