ECOLOGY

ECO-WALLS

AUSTRALIAN BROADCASTING - A house in Western Australia's south-west is
being built entirely from recycled wine bottles. Around 13,500 wine
bottles will be used in the walls of the house, which owner Peter Little
says will save energy. He says by filling the bottles with water, the
entire building will be insulated. Mr Little has spent 30 years
developing environmentally-friendly building methods and he says this
one has potential for Australia's hotter regions. "Water is probably, I
think one of the miracle building materials of this century which nobody
is using," he said. "From our point of view it can store more energy,
heat or cool than any material we know."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/australia/wa/bunbury/200703/s1867910.htm

TREE HUGGER - Wall Street Journal has brought to our attention that
plastered straw bale walls have been proven, now, to be a fire-safe
envelope for both residential and commercial buildings. Engineer and
straw bale advocate Bruce King recently paid for an insurance-required
test of fire resistance of straw bale walls, whereby "workers fired up a
super-hot gas furnace next to a wall stuffed with straw in hopes of
calming skittish insurers, bankers and building inspectors who have been
reluctant to embrace big buildings insulated with bales of dried
grasses". The test wall satisfactorily withstood over two hours of
1,700-degree heat and the following hose-down.

From the WSJ article: "Inch for inch, straw bales insulate about the
same as fiberglass, but because they are so much thicker than typical
rolls of insulation, they provide a stronger shield against heat and
cold. Straw bales often are procured from local farms, reducing
pollution that comes from transporting construction materials, a key
concern of green-building advocates. Straw is also easier to dispose of
because it's biodegradable.". . .

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/straw_bale_cons.php

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