Most Sustainable Building Material

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Building sustainably for the future is going to require a good amount of thought. Every building material have pros and cons, I found many different opinions on this topic and am constantly researching new alternatives to help our environment. What do you find the most sustainable building material and why?

It's a great question and I chose straw because it was available within a reasonable distance from where I live and is (was) considered a waste product of agriculture. As you say, pro's and con's for everything and you do need lots of other materials than straw to build a strawbale building but it's a huge amount of the bulk of our building. I look forward to reading other peoples responses. Thanks for starting the discussion.
Cheers
Cate

It all depends on where you are, with the soil and weather, and close by materials, especially those right on the building location. Tires rammed with compactable subsoil are great. Straw bales are great if they are close by and cheap, but have a low weight bearing ability unless used as insulation infill with timber or steel frame. They can also use other recycled materials for walls inside. If you are building where there are a lot of rocks--use them. Jungle areas use the large leaves and materials from the clearing. Some places, they use mud, and others tunnel into rock if it is soft enough yet still resilient. A frames use the least for lumber construction, mainly from sustainably harvested and engineered lumber products. Minimal concrete use (and other processed building materials), and minimal wood use, along with heavy use of indigenous materials. Maximum use of re-used, or recycled materials. Going underground as much as possible, too, depending on the area.
Sustainable means something that can keep on indefinitely, and that would require a much lower population. After getting rid of all the garbage and reducing to a sustainable population, then sustainable building would only be that which replaces the buildings that have become structurally unsound.

Yeah, right, and an ad for water fueled BS cars at the bottom. Earthships are the greenest of the green with minimal use of standard building products and maximum use of indigenous materials and re-using waste products that are piling up world wide. With solar and wind energy systems, water recycling systems, compost toilets, solar heat and natural cooling, solar oven, super thermal mass and insulation from the subsoil dug out. Go to Earthship Biotecture Sustainable Green Buildings - Earthship Biotecture
You can design your own and build it yourself, if you have the intelligence and drive to do it.

The new building products that will help us improve our surroundings at home and at work. Each line of products meets stringent Eco Friendly products requirements so that you have a choice to build and repair with products that are good for the Planet.

Originally Posted by nrdthxpr

Surely the most "sustainable" building material must be stone, obviously because it resists so well the ravages of time and weather. The problem is, even that plentiful supply would be exhausted by the relentless growth of the human population, 7 billion and counting.

Absolutely, and I am reading the book of poetry. Stone in the form of gravel rammed inside thick rubber tires, protected with over an inch of stucco and plaster, and a good roof with overhangs to protect the walls, could outlast other building materials that are green. Quarrying stone and transporting it is not green, and niether is the use of solid high density concrete which would outlast all but the most resisatant volcanic rock. Nothing is sustainable without a sustainable population. The greenest thing I did was have only one child. Next was the Earthship with year 'round gardens, composters and composting toilet, rainwater catchment and gray water use, recycled and re-used , and indigenous materials. Solar energy for all of it and a hybrid vehicle for our minimal travel. There used to be more rice strraw burned each year in California to make all the exterior walls of the houses being built in the late 1990s, according to the Real Goods Solar Living Source Book. The Earthship series by Mike Reynolds out of Taos are very good, one through three. No mortgage, now THAT is nice for us. A building that could last until the sun goes nova would not be a 'sustainable' house, or something you could built lots of and continue to do so without harming the Earth's biosphere. First, the Earth's biosphere must be cleansed of garbage and pollution. Billions of tires are part of the problem. Too many people is the worst problem. Tie your tubes, ladies, I did.

I found Herman Daly's books to be easy to understand and very logical while that of his opposite, Jullian Simon, were rantings of a lunatic. Making all things bought or consumed have their costs to the environment built in rather than what the market will bear profiteering costs, is necessary. Not having true costs included, meaning pollution cleanup, and depletion of resources, makes water, much food, and electronics at artificially low prices. Overpopulated places have lower wages so can produce a product for far less, too. People in other overpopulated areas with falling wages prefer to buy the cheaper product. The one-two punch of having overpopulation with a growth only economy that refuses to deal with true costs or greed, has become a vicious circle. A death spiral for the Earth's biosphere, with most people completely ignorant of what is happening.
Earthship villages, remote and well defended, will still not last the many thousands of years of malevolent climate. Those who build underground fortresses with their own aquifer and a nuclear reactor powering grow lights (like the Bush compound in Paraguay), will eventually have to come up to a surface incapable of supporting human life.
Unless, of course, humans change their ways to sustainability, reduce their numbers to half and nearly stop fossil fuel use within a generation. If saving Earth's biosphere becomes a politico/religious movement everywhere, then there is a chance that the Extinction Level Event (geologically) will not happen. The cleanup will take hundreds of years of concerted efforts and inventiveness. The too little too late politics of late will have to change. The idea that having kids is a right instead of a responsibility will have to end. Green living and green building with green energy will have to take solid root everywhere.

Originally Posted by Val

It all depends on where you are, with the soil and weather, and close by materials, especially those right on the building location. Tires rammed with compactable subsoil are great. Straw bales are great if they are close by and cheap, but have a low weight bearing ability unless used as insulation infill with timber or steel frame. They can also use other recycled materials for walls inside. If you are building where there are a lot of rocks--use them. Jungle areas use the large leaves and materials from the clearing. Some places, they use mud, and others tunnel into rock if it is soft enough yet still resilient. A frames use the least for lumber construction, mainly from sustainably harvested and engineered lumber products. Minimal concrete use (and other processed building materials), and minimal wood use, along with heavy use of indigenous materials. Maximum use of re-used, or recycled materials. Going underground as much as possible, too, depending on the area.
Sustainable means something that can keep on indefinitely, and that would require a much lower population. After getting rid of all the garbage and reducing to a sustainable population, then sustainable building would only be that which replaces the buildings that have become structurally unsound.

I remember in the Real Goods Solar living Sourcebook, that there was enough rice straw burned annually in California alone, to provide superinsulated stawbale wall material for every house built in the US, back before the recession hit.
However, all causes are lost causes until we come to grips with overpopulation---the NPG slogan. In the new book by Dudo Erny, "Babbling Green", he says every environmental problem can be "cured" with family planning (as if everyone was intelligent enough). Everything indicates that with the effects of aquifer depletion, soil depletion, fisheries depletion and oil depletion along with the cummulative effects of air, water and soil pollution effects, including AGW, that the food and water the Earth can produce will reduce to 50 to 65% of what it is now. Five out of the past six years, the grain consumption has exceeded the harvest. To reduce population that much would require more than just family planning, unfortunately(6 billion poor or 4.5 billion as now, by 2050). It is getting nearer and nearer the point where the "cure" is almost as bad as the "disease".
If everyone would have gone to one child families and to totally green living (solar power, Earthship, hybrid vehicle, local and self grown food, recycle, reduce, reuse, etal.), when we did, then it wouldn't also take an increased death rate to reach sustainable before the crash. Now it is one child families by force and only to the "qualified", forced green living, and an increased death rate (through withholding health care and increasing death penalties) that will work to achieve sustainability and save the Earth's biosphere from not only our population crash(with attendent wars and cannibalism preceded by decades of abject poverty), but an ELE afterward(from tundra then oceanic methane releases---thermageddon). I am with JTR in finding that probably won't happen, and is repugnant. Build eco-villages and hope for the best is about all we can now do.

i have to argue that cellulose insulation is a very sustainable building material. ground up newspaper, recycles newspapers, or from trees. someone below mentions straw. that is a great idea also but no that great for practical applications.
phillip rye
http://www.philliprye.com
http://www.rye-homes.com