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Building with Cannabis: a Hempcrete Construction Hotel

Posted on August 31, 2023 by dishanth

Imagine a world where buildings are not only sustainable but also contribute to the fight against climate change; hempcrete construction might be the key. A world where construction materials come from renewable sources and have minimal environmental impact. In this post, we will explore the fascinating world of hempcrete construction and take a closer look at one groundbreaking project: the 12-story Hemp Hotel in South Africa, set to open its doors in 2024.

Why Hempcrete Construction?
Why choose hempcrete construction? Hempcrete is an eco-friendly alternative to traditional building materials. It is made from a mixture of the inner woody core of the hemp plant, known as the hurd, and a lime-based binder. This combination creates a lightweight material with excellent thermal insulation properties.

Hempcrete also has exceptional breathability, allowing moisture to pass through without causing damage or mold growth. This natural ventilation helps regulate indoor humidity levels and promotes healthier living environments.

Another advantage of hempcrete is its fire resistance. Due to the high content of mineralized cellulose fibers in the hemp stalks, it can withstand extreme temperatures more effectively than conventional building materials.

Best of all, hemp plants grow rapidly and require minimal water and pesticides compared to other crops used in construction materials. They absorb carbon dioxide during their growth cycle, and sequester it in the building, making hempcrete a carbon-negative choice for builders.

Choosing hempcrete construction means opting for an environmentally friendly solution that offers superior insulation properties, increased durability against fire hazards, improved indoor air quality due to breathability advantages, and supports sustainable agricultural practices.

The Hemp Hotel, South Africa 2024

We have seen many homes built with Hempcrete Construction, but not as many commercial buildings. For all the same reasons that hempcrete construction makes sense in residential applications, it may be even more beneficial in commercial applications. For example, a stunning 12-story hotel made entirely from hempcrete is becoming a reality in South Africa. Set to open its doors in 2024, the Hemp Hotel is set to revolutionize the hospitality industry with its sustainable and eco-friendly construction.

Located in Cape Town, this groundbreaking project, built by Hempcrete Construction experts Afrimat Hemp, aims to showcase the incredible versatility and durability of hempcrete as a building material. Hempcrete is made by mixing hemp fibers with lime and water, creating a lightweight yet incredibly strong substance that is both fire-resistant and highly insulating.

But what makes the Hemp Hotel truly unique is not just its construction materials – it’s also about promoting sustainability throughout every aspect of its design. From energy-efficient lighting systems to rainwater harvesting, this hotel will be an example of environmental consciousness.

Not only will guests have the opportunity to experience luxury accommodation while reducing their carbon footprint, but they’ll also gain insight into how we can build more sustainably for future generations.

Other Hempcrete Applications

Aside from residential and commercial buildings, hempcrete has a wide range of applications. Its versatility and eco-friendly nature make it a promising material for various projects.

Infrastructure: Hempcrete can be used in the construction of bridges, roads, and other infrastructure projects. Its lightweight yet strong properties make it an ideal choice for these applications.
Agricultural Structures: Greenhouses, barns, and storage facilities can also be built using hempcrete. The breathable nature of the material creates an optimal environment for plants while providing insulation against extreme temperatures.
Public Spaces: Hempcrete’s sustainability can benefit parks, pavilions, and public restrooms. Not only does it offer durability and low maintenance requirements, but it also contributes to creating healthier environments for visitors.
Artistic Installations: As a creative medium, hempcrete offers endless possibilities for artists and designers to explore their imagination. Sculptures, installations, or even furniture pieces made with this unique material add an element of sustainability to art exhibitions or public spaces.
Retrofitting Existing Buildings: Instead of demolishing old structures that do not meet modern energy efficiency standards, retrofitting them with hempcrete can significantly improve their thermal performance while maintaining their historical value.

The potential uses of hempcrete are vast and exciting! As more people become aware of its benefits as a sustainable building material, we can expect to see further innovation in its application across different industries.

The rise of sustainable construction practices has paved the way for innovative solutions like hempcrete. The Hemp Hotel in South Africa showcases not only the beauty and functionality of this remarkable material but also serves as inspiration for future projects around the world. With more emphasis on environmentally conscious building methods, we can create spaces that benefit people and the planet alike.

Source Happy Eco News

Five of the best sustainable holidays across Europe

Posted on August 22, 2022 by dishanth

Green Wellness Route, Slovenia

This summer the country’s tourist board launched a new Green Wellness cycling route. A looping cycle trail of nearly 200 miles linking natural spas, it starts in Ljubljana and heads north towards the Austrian border and then south-west towards Croatia, winding through mountains, plains and vineyards. There’s a castle on an island, a beer fountain and miles of wild flowers. The first leg ends in medieval Kamnik, a red-roofed town of castles and monasteries with a view of the mountains, Slovenia’s biggest arboretum (sporting 2m tulips in April) and the Terme Snovik spa in the forested Tuhinj valley.

Resorts along the route are all certified by Slovenia Green, which encourages recycling, renewable energy, arriving car-free, eco-friendly cleaning, locally grown food, natural building materials and so on. The spas offer pools fed by thermal springs, mineral waters to drink and wellness experiences involving salt, saunas, massage and barefoot paths.

Slovenia launched a Green Wellness cycling route this summer, including stretches along the River Savinja

Along the route cyclists can visit the world’s oldest noble vine at Maribor or sip a crystal glass of magnesium-rich water at Rogaška Slatina. Slovenia’s temperate Mediterranean climate means good cycling for most of the year, though April to October is recommended. The Wellness route has several companion trails, including a Green Gourmet cycling route or a three-day Pannonian route through the Pomurje region. The Gourmet trail starts with a train ride on the Bohinj railway under the Julian Alps. A free pass encourages public transport use in the area for those who want to linger.

Sustainable city break in Berlin, Germany

When luggage storage company Bounce recently surveyed sustainable hotels and transport, Berlin emerged as Europe’s most eco-friendly city. According to its analysis, 84% of tourists and residents get around on bike, foot or public transport. And Germany’s summer scheme, offering unlimited travel on local and regional trains for €9, has got even more people out of their cars.

An upcycled caravans in Neukölln’s Hüttenpalast. Photograph: Jan Brockhaus

From upcycled caravans to a hammock-strung hotel overlooking the zoo, Berlin is full of cool places to stay

Berlin joined the Global Sustainable Tourism Council in August 2021 and Visit Berlin lists eco hotels, restaurants and sights. They include places like SPRK Deli, which makes everything from surplus food. Klub Kitchen is popular with Mitte’s hipsters, serving up salady bowlfuls of sweet potato, ginger, pumpkin seeds, edamame and other tasty things. From upcycled east German caravans in a former vacuum cleaner factory in Neukölln’s Hüttenpalast to the hammock-strung 25 Hours Bikini hotel overlooking the zoo, the city is full of cool places to stay.

To explore Berlin’s wilder corners, buy an all-zone travelcard (€10 a day, including Potsdam with its parks and palaces). Buses 100 and 200 are good sightseeing routes, running from Alexanderplatz to Zoo through leafy Tiergarten. Head into the Grunewald on bus 218 to find Berlin’s best hike, the cliff-top Havelhöhenweg. Follow this six-mile waymarked walk past sandy beaches for wild swimming and leisurely woodland cafes.

YHA Festival of Walking

Those lonely months of strolls during the Covid lockdowns sparked a lot of interest in walking. The UK’s Youth Hostel Association hopes to tap into that with its new Festival of Walking. There will be group walks, routes to download, free tea or coffee for walkers, and 25% off at various youth hostels. There’s a guided Snowdon dark skies challenge – climbing up the mountain by torchlight and down as the sun rises for breakfast in the hostel. Lots of hostels, such as Eskdale in Cumbria and Blaxhall in Suffolk have been pioneering sustainable practices: energy-efficient lighting, solar hot water, and community recycling schemes.

The festival runs from 4 September to 20 October. “We want more walkers to discover our hostels and all they offer,” says YHA chief executive James Blake. “Whether it’s a bed for the night, a day visit for a cuppa, filling up a bottle at a refill station, using a drying room or just grabbing a loo break.”

A guided Snowdon dark skies challenge will feature in the festival

Individuals and groups can log their miles on the festival website to tramp round the world in 46 days. Blake points out that if 5,000 people walk five miles each, together they will have walked around the world. The YHA was set up in 1930 to help foster a “greater knowledge, love and care of the countryside – an aim that feels as fresh and necessary as it did 92 years ago.

Bird watching in Extremadura, Spain

Extremadura is one of Europe’s top birding destinations, with everything from bee-eaters to honey buzzards. The birds of prey are particularly dramatic, with 23 breeding species including 1,200 pairs of black vultures. More common cranes overwinter here than anywhere in Europe. Covering 16,000 square miles, Extremadura is bigger than the Netherlands, with a human population of just over a million and a huge range of habitats.

As most visiting birders get here independently, the Extremadura tourist board set up the world’s first bird tourism club, following the model of wine or whisky routes, to help travellers find information, guides and places to stay. Travel can actually help conserve biodiversity because the bird-watching cash provides a sound economic reason to preserve habitats.

More common cranes overwinter here than anywhere in Europe

A magnet for visiting birders since it opened in 2005, the Casa Rural El Recuerdo (three nights from €216 room-only) is a converted farmhouse with an organic olive grove and vegetable garden. The guesthouse generates half its energy from solar panels. Owners Claudia and Martin Kelsey encourage year-round wildlife trips for the large number of migrant birds, plus summer butterfly and dragonfly tours. As a local guide, Martin can take visitors to see species they want to find without having to drive too far, meaning less fuel and more time in the field.

Green Velo, Poland

With more than a thousand miles of linked cycle paths and quieter roads through wild natural landscapes, Poland’s longest fully-signed bicycle trail tours the country’s eastern areas. Five regions, with funding from the European Regional Development Fund, cooperated to create the epic Green Velo trail. Miles of cycle path have been designed to be low-maintenance with no impact on water supplies or vegetation; there are benches, refill points, bike racks and rubbish bins. Accommodation varies from campsites to castles.

The Green Velo trail passes through marshes near the Narew River

The trail meanders through 12 areas or “bike kingdoms”, such as the Świętokrzyski national park, with its huge forests and mountains. In another kingdom, the marshes around the Biebrza and Narew rivers are great for birdwatching and elk spotting, for cycling past gold marsh marigolds and purple Siberian iris. The waymarked Green Velo route circles the edge of protected valleys, with views across the spring-flowering marshes. There are bats, beavers and lots more wildlife along the Narew valley towards Łomża with its convent and cathedral.

Other attractions along the route include the mysterious Krzyżtopór castle near Ujazd, and the city of Kielce, with its palaces and galleries. The Green Velo loops through the centre of Kielce, passing the Kadzielnia Reserve in a limestone quarry; there are concerts here in a natural amphitheatre among fossil-filled rocks.

Source The Guardian

Building’s hard problem – making concrete green

Posted on May 14, 2021 by dishanth

A time-travelling Victorian stumbling upon a modern building site could largely get right to work, says Chris Thompson, managing director of Citu, which specialises in building low-carbon homes.

That’s because many of the materials and tools would be familiar to him.

The Victorian builder would certainly recognise concrete, which has been around for a long time.

The world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome remains the one at Rome’s Pantheon, which is almost 2,000 years old. The Colosseum is largely concrete too.

Today we use more concrete than any substance, other than water.

That means it accounts for about 8% of the carbon dioxide (CO2) we emit into the atmosphere. That is substantially more than the aviation industry, which makes up about 2.5% of emissions.

The Pantheon in Rome – almost 2,000 years old and built from concrete. GETTY IMAGES

But some companies are developing concrete that has a much lower CO2 impact.

Citu is building its headquarters in Leeds from a new low-carbon concrete that it says cuts CO2 emissions by 50% compared to traditional concrete.

It has used 70 cubic metres of it for the building’s foundations.

Some buildings, like this one in Mexico, are being constructed using Cemex’s low-carbon concrete. CEMEX

This concrete, released last year by Mexico’s Cemex under the label Vertua, is one of a series of recent developments helping pave the way to greener concrete.

Making cement, which makes up 10-15% of concrete, is a carbon-intensive process. Limestone has to be heated to 1,450C, which normally requires energy from fossil fuels and accounts for 40% of concrete’s CO2.

This separates calcium oxide (which you want) from carbon dioxide (which is the problem).

This calcium oxide reacts further to form cement. Grind some into powder, add some sand, gravel and water, and it forms interlocking crystals.

Voilà, concrete.

So how can you do all this without releasing so much CO2?

Karen Scrivener has been working on a way to replace some of the cement in concrete. EPFL

One way is by replacing much of the conventional cement with heated clay and unburnt limestone, says Karen Scrivener, a British academic and head of the construction materials laboratory at Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.

For a long time, people (think, Romans) knew you could substitute some of the cement with ash from burning coal (or volcanoes). Or more recently, slag from blast furnaces. This even improved concrete’s strength and durability.

Prof Scrivener was approached by Prof Fernando Martirena from Cuba, who thought it might be possible to use clay in the production of concrete.

So together they worked out a way to replace a really big chunk of conventional cement, and produce equally strong concrete.

Not only would that mean 40% less CO2, it also works with existing equipment, according to Prof Scrivener.

And that’s crucial for a material that has to be competitively priced.

Two companies last year began commercially cooking up this product, called LC3 (for limestone calcined clay cement).

“I reckon next year about 10 plants are going into operation, and really we can see an exponential take-off after that,” she says.

A further 10-20% savings on CO2 emissions can come from finding new ways of making cement more reactive, she adds.

Often people pour in more cement than they actually need, to get early strength.

But if you put in very tiny amounts of other minerals instead, that seems to increase the reactivity too, she says.

Another approach is just coming up with an utterly different way to clench the sand and stone particles together, without cooking limestone into calcium oxide.

This is what Vertua does, says Davide Zampini, head of research for Cemex, the world’s second biggest building materials business.

“It’s a binder that’s rich in aluminosilicates (minerals made from aluminium and silicon), and we have produced chemicals to activate those, and go through a reaction called geopolymerisation,” he explains.

This forms a 3D network of molecules, and a solid binder to grip sand and stone in place.

But it’s not as cheap as conventional concrete, admits Dr Zampini.

You have to find a customer who is really keen on significantly reducing the CO2 footprint of their buildings, he says, like Citu in Leeds.

Cement firms are experimenting with towers like this one which catch the CO2. LEILAC

A third approach is using a big steel tube, says Daniel Rennie, co-ordinator of a project called LEILAC (Low Emissions Intensity Lime and Cement).

It’s 60m (197ft) tall. You can add it to an existing cement plant.

You “chuck materials down from the top” and it gently floats down the tube, which is heated from the outside.

As CO2 comes off the particles, “we just capture it at the top, the calcium oxide continues to the bottom and continues its journey in the cement-making process,” he says.

The project is run by Calix, an Australian company that makes environmentally sustainable technology for industry.

Once captured by the tower the CO2 is compressed and stored in an empty oil reservoir. LEILAC

The company had been thinking about how to decarbonise another building material.

“And just, the penny dropped, and we could apply this to cement,” Mr Rennie says.

A little pilot tower, built in 2019, is now accounting for 5% of production at Heidelberg Cement’s Lixhe plant in Belgium.

This is capturing about 25,000 tonnes a year of CO2.

In Germany, they’re building one at another Heidelberg plant in Hanover, where 20% of total production will go through the new process, capturing about 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year.

Once captured, the CO2 is compressed, shipped in a barge to Norway, and stored in an empty oil reservoir under the North Sea.

Normally “90% of the cost is capturing the carbon”, so this just leaves the cost of transport and storage.

Innovations that were just ideas 20 years ago are now taking hold in the concrete industry, says Claude Loréa. JOHNNY BLACK

“I’ve been in this industry 20 years, and I really see a big change,” says Claude Loréa, cement director from the Global Cement and Concrete Association.

“Stuff we dreamed about 20 years ago is now coming through,” she adds.

And cement makers have already reduced their carbon emissions “almost by 20% since 1990”, she says, largely by making kilns more energy-efficient.

Still, while we can probably get overall CO2 emissions down by 60-80%, we’ll still end up with some we’ll need to capture and store, says Prof Scrivener.

Also, there’s no point looking for intricate solutions that can just be used in “some very sophisticated factories in the US”, she says.

Around 90% of future cement production will take place outside the wealthy OECD countries.

A concrete path to cutting concrete’s carbon emissions needs alternatives that will work well and cheaply for the coming building booms in India and Africa.

Concrete may have been born in Rome and Britain.

But China made more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the US did in the whole 20th Century.

By Padraig Belton – Technology of Business reporter

Source BBC