Years ago I spent a good part of my early career as an editor for several magazines published by McGraw-Hill Publishing Cos. that dealt with mining, construction and engineering. Alternative building methods and materials were very much grass roots and connected more with energy conservation than commodity supply. Now, with economically burgeoning nations such as China demanding ever increasing supplies of cement and steel, the hunt for alternative building materials is on.
Yesterday I started some preliminary research online for information about alternative construction materials. This information will be used for an article in our September construction issue. Mind you, this is just the beginning of my search but I found some interesting sites:
Granny’s Country Store is a place where you can find all sorts of books on alternative home building.
EcoBuisnessLinks is an environmental directory of alternative and sustainable building materials.
Finally, in my short cyber searching journey I found this funny but satirical piece on Buzzle.com about insulating a structure with Danielle Steel novels. Makes sense, they are found in every yard sale, they are cheap and definitely compact.
But so far, I haven’t found anything about alternative building material for commercial structures such as self-storage. And we need to get with the program folks. A very wise man once told me everything we humans use is either grown or mined, even oil drilling is a form of mining. So, everything we need for growth comes from what already exists. We can’t fabricate it out of air, the molecules won’t cooperate.
Help out this writer. If anyone out there knows of any alternative building going on, please leave a comment below.