Buckminster Fuller famously said that “waste materials are simply resources we haven’t found a use for.” So, what if we could use agricultural waste products like corn husks or coconut coir as building materials? The truth is that we can, and a number of innovative sustainable builders are working to not just reduce the carbon emissions associated with construction but turn homes and commercial buildings into carbon storage units.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Do you like this show? Please rate us and review us on iTunes, or the sometimes-called Apple Podcasts. It helps a lot. We would very much appreciate it. And if you haven’t heard our other show, Carbon Removal Newsroom, you should check that out too, in your podcast app. It’s also on SoundCloud, it’s on YouTube. If you’re one of those people who like to listen to a podcast on YouTube — I know there’s people out there, I see them adding to our stats all the time. So yeah, in your podcast app or any of those other places. And thanks for joining us, and I’ll pass it over to my co-host.
Christophe Jospe: It’s an exciting day today. This is Christophe Jospe speaking. I get to co-host with my colleague Alexsandra Guerra. What’s up? She’s the environmental engineer — also environmental entrepreneur, I guess, so you’re both of those. That means you get to ask the geeky environmental engineering questions. We promised these guys we wouldn’t get too geeky. They just are hot off — literally, like, I think a couple, like maybe under an hour ago, they were on stage at the Living Future conference presenting to a bunch of smart people who think about how to design buildings that are low carbon, no carbon, zero carbon. We’ll figure out what that even means on this podcast and get into all sorts of things.
Anyway, we’ll start with Chris Magwood sitting across from us. He is the director of the Endeavour Centre — spelt the weird Canadian way — and also runs two full-time certificate programs, which include sustainable new construction and sustainable renovations. And he can be found at many workshops all over. And we also have Jacob Deva Racusin, and Jacob is the co-owner of New Frameworks Natural Building. They offer services in green remodeling, new construction, consultation. We just found out that Jacob also has a background in music. It is really cool. We love music. Music and climate change have more connections than everyone might think.
So yeah, I mean, Jake — Jacob’s a builder, a consultant, an educator. We like people who actually have practical knowledge and know-how of the solutions that they’re talking to and connected with. And Chris is a long-time podcast listener, so welcome to the show, especially because it’s so cool to have the listeners now actual guests. We like to start with people’s story, Chris, as you well know. So let’s start with yours, and how you got to where you are today.
Chris Magwood: Sure. Okay. Well, my relationship to building things started with trying to build a house for myself and my family back in the mid-90s, and starting to try to do research around what could we do. We had this notion that you could probably do something better for the environment. Wasn’t a lot of material out there. Read lots of books — actually had to go to libraries, you couldn’t just Google these things — and ran into a lot of dead ends. We would get excited about something we would find, and then we’d research it and go, I don’t know, it doesn’t really, you know, seem to do the things that we wanted to do environmentally speaking.
And ended up telling the story to a bookstore owner in Toronto one day, and she said, I’ve got just the book for you. And she went back to the back room and came out with this book on straw bale building, which I almost burst out laughing when she handed it over, because it’s like we’d been sort of looking at things that seemed sort of crazier and crazier and crazier on this pursuit. And I ended up buying the book as a total tongue-in-cheek joke, to take home to my partner. Like, ha ha, we’ve looked at all of these things. Let’s look at straw bale. That’s what you have to do. Puff and you blow.
That’s right. Exactly. Yeah, but we sort of had this funny reaction where all these other things we’d gotten excited about and then cooled off on as we learned more — and the straw bale thing, we were completely skeptical, all our questions kept getting answered really well. And so we ended up building the first straw bale house in Ontario, Canada. That was the only building I was thinking that I would ever make, but then people started showing up uninvited and saying, hey, we heard what you did, we want to see it. And that led to somebody saying, hey, I’m holding a straw bale workshop, do you want to teach it? And at the straw bale workshop somebody said, hey, I’m building a house, would you come and help me build it? And it just sort of rolled into a business.
So with a couple of partners I built about 40 straw bale houses as a contractor, and then got into teaching people how to do it. And that’s the last 15 years of my life, has been sort of hands-on teaching people what to do. And my relationship to all this carbon stuff is, in 2012 I wrote a book called Making Better Buildings, and I was trying to sort of put metrics to all kinds of different sustainable building materials. And I kind of added at the last minute — I happened to find this database out of England that looked at embodied carbon numbers for building materials, and I thought, I’ll just throw these numbers in, because I’m looking at them and it’s really easy to do. And didn’t think much about it at the time.
But then I thought, like, this is really interesting. You know, climate change is a thing, these numbers, some of them are really high, some of them are really low. And so I decided to model one of our buildings at Endeavour and was kind of stunned by the answer. There were things we were doing that we thought were great for the environment that turned out to be sort of climate nightmares that we were sort of performing. And then on the other side, some of the materials we were using, like the straw bales, were these incredible sort of climate heroes, where there is more carbon being stored in the material than was being emitted in making that material.
And that kind of started this path of just researching this. And then I thought, well, I’m just a builder, I’m not a researcher, I don’t really know if I’m getting the right answer. So I went back to school to do a master’s degree to have somebody tell me, am I doing this right or not? And it turns out I kind of was, and turns out you can store a whack-load of carbon in building materials.
Christophe Jospe: I stayed in a building like that, actually, on my honeymoon in Hokkaido, Japan. Stayed in a crazy straw building. It shook a little bit when the trucks rolled by, but I really liked it. It was kind of a hobbit feel to it.
Chris Magwood: Yeah. I mean, the notion of natural building is it’s everywhere in the world. I mean, it’s the only way things got built until a hundred years ago. So, yeah, everybody sort of got their traditions of using those materials.
Christophe Jospe: That’s so cool. And it kind of brings to mind one common theme in this podcast, and that’s really carbon removal solutions, as we like to think about things that people interact with every day and how those can become — and I’m going to throw out a term, it’s a little bit jargony but I kind of hope it catches on — more carbon beneficial. And so, looking at food as carbon beneficial: is the food that we’re eating putting more carbon in the soil? Are the clothes that we’re wearing actually putting more carbon either in the materials or in a life cycle? Or are the buildings that we’re living in carbon beneficial, and sort of on net putting more carbon away? Because obviously that gets us really excited from the carbon cycle perspective.
We’re going to dive into what straw bale even means and how that might all add up. But before we do, we’ll pass it over to you, Jacob. I know you also live in a straw bale house. I’m kind of jealous. I feel like, what am I doing in my little apartment? But [unclear]. But how did you get to where you are today?
Jacob Deva Racusin: Yeah, thanks for having me here. So my path into all of this was as an owner-builder. My background is actually in sustainable agriculture, in organic agriculture, and really wanted to apply some of the same, like, values and priorities towards shelter. And I’d had a young family and we’re looking for a home. Actually, my wife is pretty chemically sensitive and we really weren’t finding a whole lot on the market that was, you know, safe, healthy housing, nor anything that, like, felt good or looked good, or from an energy profile made any sense. And there’s a lot of really poor, old, toxic housing stock on the East Coast. So it kind of pushed us more towards building new.
And a combination of a series of different things all led me also towards straw bale architecture as being the solution for us. And it was kind of a combination of things. One, I worked in a home office that was a straw bale building, and it was stunningly gorgeous and just felt and looked so much like my idea of home. And the low-toxic profile of the materials was really important and critical. And actually one of the things for me — I was a super, like, performing arts nerd. You mentioned music background. Like, I was a total music geek and had no hands-on skills and, like, no practice.
And that’s part of why I was interested in getting into agriculture, is to actually get some practical, useful life skills. And the thought of, like, joining a construction crew, or like learning how to build things with tools in this, like, you know, sort of hyper-normative masculine kind of cultural environment felt really intimidating to me. Was not into that at all. And so there was this very, like, hands-on, accessible, tangible, kind of open culture and approach to working with those materials that felt like something I can engage in.
So we built a straw bale house on an abandoned farm in the mountains of northern Vermont, [unclear] trying to set ourselves up at the homestead. And it was a long building process, and about halfway through I realized I actually really enjoyed it. There was a small group of us engaging in natural building, sustainable building techniques and technologies in Vermont, in the Northeast, and we all just sort of started hiring each other on each other’s projects. So I came at it more from a contractor side as well.
And then after a number of years, you know, we kind of kept — a few of us were growing closer and closer to each other and, again, hiring each other on each other’s work, still staying in the game. Not an easy business to make a life out of. It’s not the path of least resistance for financial success, at least at that point. And so we ultimately banded together to create a company. Actually, our business partner Ace had founded a company with another partner who left, and then I joined on, and then our third founding partner, Ben, joining from the design side of things.
And so we organized as a worker-owned cooperative design-build firm, doing initially natural building techniques, slowly, and then really it’s expanded towards carbon-responsive buildings as that’s become more and more and more on our radar as well. And so for us the mission is very much pivoted from just any material focus to applied, market-driven, real-world carbon-responsive or carbon-smart. I like carbon beneficial. We’ve been saying carbon smart, but carbon beneficial is very descriptive.
Christophe Jospe: I can’t take credit for it. It’s great, it works, it works.
Alexsandra Guerra: I feel like we’re kin, because everything you’re describing about trying to store carbon, regenerative agriculture, and then coming together, starting a company and picking the path of least resistance — you guys, I don’t know, Nori might seem glamorous on the outside, but it’s definitely, like, we’re a really good team. It’s really tough to start something on your own, and you have to try and convince people. And we were saying yesterday, it’s like, how many punches do you get in the face and just keep going? So I admire that, and thank you for that. Yeah, [unclear] right there. So I’m curious, you know, in the spirit of sharing ideas and exchanging your ideas, what are some of the things you’ve heard at this conference that most excited you?
Jacob Deva Racusin: It has actually been a very inspirational conference. I’ve got to say, this morning we heard from the sustainability director of New York City, and he just laid out all these things that they’ve just passed into law, and it was just like bam, bam, bam, and, like, really great policies. And he and all kinds of other speakers, especially at the government level, have been really making this connection that climate action and social justice happen simultaneously. You know, so New York’s climate response plan includes free accessible daycare for two- and three-year-olds, instant citizenship for anybody 10 years old and over, minimum living wage of $15 an hour.
Like, all this stuff that he very closely tied to also the climate fight, because he’s like, we need everybody on board, and the way you get people to work alongside you is to show them you’re going to work alongside them. And that’s been repeated a lot, and it’s been a part of our presentation too. It’s really nice and simple to just go, oh, this material is good, you know, put it here, done. And we’re always sort of saying, yes, and — where did it come from? And how was it grown? And who was involved, and did they get paid properly? And so it’s been really great to be at a conference, an architecture conference, where so many people get that level of kind of interconnectedness of all these issues.
Alexsandra Guerra: And that’s so key. I think sometimes we live with this expectation of being able to produce a — so reductionist, like, oh, this is the good thing, this is the bad thing, and vegan food is better for the planet. And then, like, it goes both ways. I had someone yell at me for eating a vegetarian sandwich once — I don’t, you know, that that’s just reaping the soil of its nutrients, and you know you should be eating cows. And, yeah, but not all cows are raised in rotational grazing and restoring the land. Like, a lot of them are in CAFOs. So it’s not black or white. Never black or white. It’s never straightforward and easy.
Yeah, I love grass-fed beef, but I actually heard on a call today that 80% of the grass-fed beef in America comes from Australia. So talk about carbon footprint. Come on, grass-fed beef farmers, like, get out of here in America, because I want to eat it from America.
Jacob Deva Racusin: I love that you mentioned reductionism, because that was how we started our presentation, actually. It was: if you take nothing else away from this entire presentation, it is the concept and approach of systems thinking to deal with systems problems. And yeah, I would say certainly one of my most, like, inspirational things of this conference is that this systems thinking perspective brought to this whole range of topics is, like, why would a massive acceleration of any of the different efforts on any of these different fronts — because, you know, there’s tracks on water, there’s tracks on equity, there’s, like, all these, you know, health and toxicity, like this whole host of pieces.
And they’ve done a fabulous job of really, like, you know, parsing out how to think about this in a much more of an intersectional fashion, which makes all of these things much more possible than if you’re reducing it to these itemized approaches or these, like, competing priorities.
Christophe Jospe: It’s like whack-a-mole too. I’m just going to throw out all the analogies — [unclear] carbon, toxicity. Everyone — you have to be a systems thinker to work in this space. It’s so multi-dimensional. I enjoyed reviewing your slides, Chris, before, because I saw you were usually a presenter here, and I saw over a hundred slides and was like, how is he going to get through all that? I hope it went well.
Chris Magwood: But one of the slides — we ended on the last slide at, like, the last second of the thing.
Christophe Jospe: Impressive. Congrats. Was there a lot on the slides?
Jacob Deva Racusin: No, he followed the good rules of good presentation. So if anyone needs some advice, just go to endeavourcentre.org and find the address.
Christophe Jospe: But I wanted to ask about one of the words on your slides, which was decolonize buildings. And I think that ties into this social justice element. So really, how can buildings decolonize? Like, what — and what does that mean?
Chris Magwood: Well, I mean, I sort of wish our sort of co-conspirator Ace McArleton was here. He speaks very eloquently on this. But, you know, it’s what we were talking about — it’s that we’re advocating that plant-based material is a way to store carbon in buildings. And so the reductionist version is, go get some plant stuff, stick it in a building. But, you know, the sort of colonization of the soil is that sort of mass-ag version of growing things, where soil health is not part of how they work the soil. And so the decolonizing is to sort of realize — there’s a quote from Leah Penniman’s book that we use on the slide — but basically, there’s all this life in the soil and we’ve kind of colonized it out, and it’s time to sort of invite those life forms back in.
You know, they’re really important. And, you know, in our direct work we’re looking at the amount of carbon in the top part of the plant that we snip off and put in a building. But there’s that whole — that you guys know very well — soil carbon part that goes hand in hand with that. And for as much as we can put the plant stalk in the building, if that plant is also putting more carbon than is probably in the stalk into the soil, then, yeah, you’re sort of stacking those benefits. And I think that explains it. Well, you might be more eloquent on this thing.
Jacob Deva Racusin: I mean, I guess the only thing I’d add to that is, you know, because climate justice involves both ecological and social impacts, and those aren’t different things — they are quite literally bound and tied in the same piece. And this whole — the issues of ecological justice have deep, firm roots in institutionalized racism. And that’s both the current and contemporary impacts of who is harmed by climate impacts and who has access to safe shelter and who has access to these, like, wonderful building technologies in real time, and also looking historically at, like, the effects of colonialism, which is the roots of this country, and racism, and how that has mapped our current set of massive social and ecological trauma and problems.
So in trying to sort of daylight some of those connections, again, it gives more value to the work that we’re doing and places it in a context where we can, again, not just do a material swap and pretend like that’s going to be okay. Like, we could easily have this, like, mass-commodified, like, horrendous expression of our culture, which is already happening in real time, and just totally dissociate that to get our carbon numbers to tick down, and that is not going to solve the climate crisis, because it is totally bound in justice.
So I think that, you know, soil becomes this really critical space in which all the materials grow from it, and the relationships between food and shelter and water and energy are all totally intertwined, and all of them have an impact of, are impacted by, and impact the health and quality of our soil. And so seeing some of those links there in terms of the social and climate justice makes the work that we’re doing — it’s very sort of technocratic, like counting the number of molecules of emissions and stored carbon — like, grounded in a much broader reality.
Because I come from an energy efficiency and energy modeling background, where it is so easy to just, like, fill out numbers on a spreadsheet and just look at this entire carbon thing purely in this two-dimensional metric, quantifiable thing, and none of that stuff shows up on the spreadsheet. And that’s, I think that’s part of the concept.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, he had a great voice for radio. I got a second to just listen to that go. I want to give one mild rejoinder to that. I’ve been reading Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems. I’m a bit newer to systems thinking, but at the beginning of the book she talked about even the mechanistic, sort of reductionist mentality has things to teach too, because sometimes systems thinking is a synonym for sort of, like, muddled thinking. Or you throw everything in and you’re like, what string do you pull to do all of this? It’s like, well, if we just built everything from scratch, if I, like, totally redid everything, things would be much better — and that might be true, but you’re also intervening in a complex system, and it could backfire in a horrible way.
So in some ways it’s like more limited interventions may be better. That isn’t to say you should take sides of only systems thinking or only a more reductionist kind of mentality. I think both have something to teach, and both obscure as they illuminate certain things.
Chris Magwood: That’s a great point. And that is something that, you know, in our presentation, I think in our work in general, we actually put forward both. If you’re sort of looking at the slide show, it’s like, here’s that simple sort of reductionist answer, and here’s the systems thinking part. But, you know, we are also quite clearly advocating that if a normal builder of homes swapped out their fiberglass insulation for cellulose insulation, and swapped out their foam board on the outside of the building for wood fiber board, there’s a huge and beneficial carbon impact, and it is that easy, you know? Like, so there’s both. I mean, that person doesn’t have to go, what am I doing for the soil?
Yeah. But as you try to, you know, grow that stuff up and scale it, I think that’s when it’s important. Like, I’m very happy if one contractor that we talked to switches out foam for fiberboard — that’s great, and it is an answer, and it’s really meaningful. And I also hope that as people look at how do we incorporate plant-based materials into skyscrapers, that you do that — the sort of product chain, the whole sort of chain of command — looks at it in a systems way, and doesn’t just, like, let’s mow down that forest and plant some straw so we can put it in a building. Wouldn’t that be awesome, because the carbon numbers make sense. So, yeah, I think you’re totally right. It is both. It’s the big picture and the little picture simultaneously.
Christophe Jospe: Yeah. So to recap that, then, it just is a matter of making sure that we are constantly providing enough information to have agency. Okay, this is the thing you can do — not too much information where you’re overwhelmed, but staying disclaiming, okay, well, there’s more to it, but this is what I’m suggesting for you. And this is such a fun conversation. So, but I want to pick on it, because I just pile on just on top, and making sure this isn’t just something that the one percent or point one percent afford — which, just to take a jab at passive house, and no offense against passive house, but they’re really, really expensive.
And just not accessible to the sort of people who, you’re saying, those who are most affected by climate change and don’t have the resources to pay for its impacts should benefit from these carbon drawdown buildings.
Chris Magwood: Yes. And me again — not to pick on passive house, because I like it and think it’s really valuable, but, you know, one of the things that our research points to really clearly is that that’s the problem with the reductionist thing, right? There’s this whole notion, passivhaus good for climate.
Christophe Jospe: What is a passive house? Should we talk about that?
Chris Magwood: Passive house is an energy efficiency standard, and it’s sort of quite far beyond anything that the codes offer. It’s like ultra energy efficiency in buildings. It does nothing — it sits there and it just retains the heat when you need it, kind of thing, and that’s what the name indicates. I mean, it has systems that use energy, but it’s greatly reduced. But, you know, the research work that we’re doing is sort of showing, well, you could throw all this extra material at this building that has a really high carbon footprint, thinking you’re doing the right thing for the climate — that, you know, an energy-efficient building is de facto the right thing to do for the climate — but you could actually be responsible for more emissions than your super energy-efficient building might ever make up over decades, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Would you recommend our Kate Simonen episode on life cycle assessments?
Chris Magwood: Absolutely. Okay, that’s a good place to go. This is a fun one, we dig into this one a lot. And Kate’s a colleague and was at the same conference here. Yeah, I think it’s really important that, you know, that’s where the reductionist approach doesn’t work, you know?
Alexsandra Guerra: So there’s two pieces then, right? There’s the — okay, what are the materials that I’m putting into the building, the processes by which I’m putting those materials in, and then the operation, right? So the embodied carbon and the operations piece. Are you saying that passive houses tend to shine a light on the operational aspect, that you are decreasing your emissions once you’re up and running, and not necessarily focusing on all the embodied carbon?
Chris Magwood: And quite often, in pursuit of that operational reduction, way upping your embodied impact, right? And, you know, for a long time that’s been thought of as okay, because if you look at that building, say, over a 100-year time frame, in 100 years that investment in embodied carbon will have paid itself off in energy savings. But if we’re talking about making climate change in the next dozen years, that energy-efficient home has only experienced 10% of its savings in those first 10 years, but all of its embodied carbon is in the atmosphere.
So if we want to make a difference now, it’s that up-front piece. And, you know, part of the work has been looking at scenarios in current areas, right? It’s really different when we model these buildings. Where I’m from, Ontario, Canada — Ontario has a really low grid carbon intensity and New England has a really high one, and an investment in energy efficiency in Ontario is almost meaningless. Like, the difference between a code house and a passive house on the operational side, you can barely measure the carbon impact of that. But in Vermont, there is a meaning to that.
And so, you know, making sure that you’re not just blindly doing what you think might be — okay, make an energy-efficient building, or make a low-carbon building — but think about those two things together. Think about the window of time that we have to really address this issue, and are you making the impact that needs to be made in that window of time?
Christophe Jospe: I love everything you’re saying, and it’s resonating with me especially because I’m reading a book right now called The Tyranny of Metrics. And it sounds like there’s been a focus on some of the wrong metrics in buildings, which are saying we’re doing good for the environment. And you actually answered one of the questions that I had posed in the show notes, which we don’t even need to go into, but I love the way that you put it, which is, we can’t net-zero-energy our way out of the climate crisis, which is exactly that. So I just wanted to make a comment to that. Makes a lot of sense. Alexsandra, I’d cut you off earlier — you got a question, do you want to get it in there?
Alexsandra Guerra: Thank you. So I wanted to go back to something else that we were talking about. When Ross was giving his brilliant summation about systems thinking versus reductionist and how we should tie them together, you said skyscrapers, and we’re talking about social justice. There’s so much to [unclear]. Oh my goodness. So when I’m thinking about urban areas, which are even more resource efficient and have a lower carbon footprint, and people like living in cities — I like living in cities — so how do we build buildings, multifamily buildings, with some of these materials? Like, what does that look like?
Jacob Deva Racusin: I mean, it depends on the scale of building. So there’s a whole class of folks — and Ace is the one who really turned me on to this, like, really strong advocacy around, just, you can have urban environments that have just lower-story and moderate-story buildings, and that very much changes the profile of solutions. And so I want to draw some distinction around just urban environment construction versus that mass scale of construction.
So if it’s skyscrapers we’re looking at, you know, most of the issues that we hear called out as limiting or as barriers to integration of natural materials are largely around structural issues, code environment, you know, fire code issues, and then, you know, aesthetics and zoning and permitting stuff, which really boxes designers into glass, steel, concrete, boom. And so, okay, so the enclosure — they’re being somewhat limited, at least within the short time frame within which we need to operate, to be able to change the entire infrastructure around feasibility for getting the enclosure dialed in.
But, you know, when we’re doing some of our modeling on the different parts of buildings that hold different weights of carbon depending what the material is — our interiors, like, there is a lot going on in interiors. And one of the cool things about being in this conference was they have a very strong attunement towards the health and toxicity impacts of interior materials, as well as the beauty and the biophilic design principles around working with these materials.
And okay, so you could have however many, like, miles’ worth of gypsum wallboard and latex paint and PVC, you know, wall finishings, like, filling up all of these skyscrapers, or you can replace those interiors, which are, like, way easier from a regulatory and code standpoint, and, you know, certainly from, like, structure and enclosure requirements. Like, you could separate rooms with a wide variety of materials, and those materials have the potential, if they were biogenic materials, to balance off or maybe even entirely offset the required investments of carbon to be able to get buildings up to scale.
And then you’ve got those stacked benefits of, and they’re also really non-toxic. And so, you know, people that are investing in that scale of building are more likely to be looking at, like, WELL certification or some of these other, like, non-toxic certification structures that add more value to their buildings, and might actually really care about biophilia and, like, worker productivity, or recovery rates in hospitals, or student learning rates or whatnot to come along with that. All of that is packed into the same profile of materials.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m, like, snapping my fingers. Yeah. It’s like, I’m looking at our office. It’s not a bad office, [unclear], but it’s an older building. It’s like drywall, but I’m not inspired by it. No, no, but we have a fake tree. Yeah, we have a fake tree, guys. That’s right, a fake tree. But, you know, we’re a startup and we’ve got to do it. We can’t — but I really, I’ve seen some of these living buildings and they’re just beautiful. I think that what you’re saying is so true, and we don’t even have to focus on the structural materials that stand up the building, but just the interior, and to embed these non-toxic biomaterials.
Jacob Deva Racusin: Yes, 100 percent.
Alexsandra Guerra: It is. When you go in them, it’s like a relief. It’s like motivating and inspiring, calming, creative. It’s the best thing. So it blows my mind that we were even here. Like, how do we — who thought any of this was a good idea? How did this happen? How did this happen? Yeah, good question.
Jacob Deva Racusin: Yeah, we’ve been inside some CLT, like, tall buildings. Like, CLT — right, cross-laminated timber. But basically you probably couldn’t tell the difference if you just saw, like, a giant wood beam, but they’re beautiful, and I would rather exist in one of those nine times out of ten. And I think there is, you know, also on the scale question, the solution that’s been posited for urban environments is basically super-tall buildings, like as though that’s the logical map to density — whereas really, that’s a logical map to developers making the most amount of money off the smallest square footage of property.
But there are lots of cities, lots of European cities around the world — I spent some time in Edinburgh last year — that are between three and six stories tall, super dense, really livable, wonderful things, all retail and office and, you know, cool stuff on the first floor and people living above, and great transportation systems, with the same density profile as North American cities that are putting up, you know, 20-, 80-story towers. It’s just like, that’s not necessarily the right solution to density.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s just mixed-use zoning. Is that what they’re doing? Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. I wish we had more of it. It’s not very common except, I think, in Houston — I think is the only place that really has a lot of it. Yeah. So maybe New York too.
Chris Magwood: And so I think there are a lot of things that you could think about with those super-tall buildings around their carbon footprint. Like, it takes a lot of energy to pump water to the top floor. It takes a lot of energy to run elevators, you know, all those sorts of things get progressively much, much more intense the taller you go. So I think I’m all for urban density, but I don’t think the super-tall building is, like, the de facto solution. And if we can do those three, four, five, six — that we showed in the slide show, of a beautiful seven-story straw bale apartment tower in France — you know, it’s like, at that scale the kinds of things we’re talking about are totally possible right now. There’s people doing it.
Christophe Jospe: And it’s back-of-the-envelope: how much carbon could a seven-story building store?
Chris Magwood: Well, my best carbon-storing building here — I’ll brag a little bit — was [unclear], a 2,400 square foot office building that sits — net storage was 86 tonnes of CO2, in a one-story 2,400 square foot thing. So if you stacked seven of those, whatever, seven times six is — is a totally reasonable number to throw out there.
Jacob Deva Racusin: And just to, like, bounce off some of those examples of what things could be like: we just completed a three-unit, three-story, urban infill, you know, commercially loan-funded passive house in, you know, downtown Burlington, Vermont, that we actually ran some numbers of. Well, what do you want to wrap this building with? And also just the building typology. The infill is cellulose insulation. We had all FSC prefabricated structural panels that were able to be craned on site, and then wrapped it with six and a quarter inches of wood fiber board insulation, and totally code compliant, like, and multifamily urban infill — like, all the good, fun, juicy things.
And I haven’t done the full penciling on the carbon values yet, but at least the enclosure part of things is positive, carbon storing. So, like, that’s not only, like, a thing that we could do — like, our company did that under market conditions last year.
Alexsandra Guerra: I’m here Googling, because I went way too long in this conversation without really understanding — I’m looking at a straw bale house and I see a condo here. Yeah, they look really nice.
Chris Magwood: Yeah, it really is, like, the bales of straw stacked on top of each other, but within the structure of normal architecture. Yeah. And straw’s not the only material, really. There are so many different ag residues and waste stream materials available. Like, straw was, for both of us, our path into this. But I do a lot of work with hempcrete.
Christophe Jospe: Wait, hold on. I’m going to stop you there, because, okay, you’re queuing up a game that I want to play. Oh, excellent. Both of you — which is, we’re talking about carbon beneficial, drawdown building, whatever we want to call it, stuff that’s towards carbon. And rapid-fire, Alexsandra or I will say a term such as hempcrete — you already queued that one — so then the two of you get in, as succinctly as possible: what is it? How does it work? What are the good things about it? What are some of the maybe challenges or considerations about it? And then X factor, like, whatever you want to say about it, as simply as possible. Okay? Ready, let’s go. Hempcrete.
Chris Magwood: So hempcrete is the inner core of the hemp plant. So if you’re growing hemp for fiber or you’re growing hemp for marijuana — which we realize is legal here in this state, and where I come from too — there’s a sort of puffy, lightweight core to that plant. You chop that up, you coat it in lime, which is sort of a limestone cement-like but not cement binder, and you put it in walls and it’s insulation. Its benefits are, because it’s coated in lime, it’s completely fire retardant, and it’s extremely great at handling really moist scenarios, which not all plant-based materials are.
So I was just in South Carolina before I came here, and hempcrete’s super appropriate there, you know, in places where it’s really hot, it’s really humid. You may be inviting questions of mold if you’re just throwing plants in walls, you know. Hempcrete is really great for that.
Jacob Deva Racusin: When you get the industry ready to be able to take cannabis production and also have a value-added product the builders can easily access — there’s still a little bit of a range between those. And so there’s some, like, industry development and cross-industry collaboration that will be needed. My X factor is, I work in a lot of existing buildings, and one of the big issues we see are people using two-part spray foam to do [unclear], to do, like, open cavity fills, which is, like, one of the most climate-destructive insulation materials we could use. And I would love to see all that two-part spray foam be replaced with spray-applicated hempcrete. That’s, like, my personal goal for our company within the next few years.
Christophe Jospe: Okay, great. Next one. I picked this one because it just jumped out to me: coconut coir. C-O-I-R.
Chris Magwood: Yeah, that’s not something I’ve worked with, but it’s essentially, you know, when you have a coconut and there’s hairy stuff on the shell, they sort of pull the hairy stuff out and it’s just a bunch of long fibers. So it’s not something that’s being used, you know, here in this part of North America, but elsewhere in the world both the coir and the shells are bio-based materials that people are pressing into panel boards, people are using them as insulation. And there’s a Mexican builder who does what I just described with hempcrete, with coconut shells. So, yeah, I mean, basically the secret of all of this stuff is: look around, what’s your local ag waste? And there’s probably a way to, you know, put it in a building.
Christophe Jospe: [unclear]. Aggregate from carbonated waste.
Chris Magwood: Okay, yeah. So there’s a couple of companies that are setting up typically next to cement production plants. So cement, which is the glue that holds concrete together, is one of the sort of climate bad guys, because what you’re doing when you make cement is you are taking limestone and you’re heating it up to a really high temperature. So you’ve got to burn a lot of fuel, which has a lot of emissions, to heat up that rock.
Christophe Jospe: That’s the calcination, right?
Chris Magwood: Yeah. And then what’s happening — one of the main chemical processes that’s happening when you heat up that rock is you’re literally driving the CO2 that was in the rock into the atmosphere. So you make a pound of cement, you’ve essentially put about a pound of CO2 into the atmosphere. And we use billions of pounds of cement every year. So there are a few companies that set up next to a cement plant. They basically pull those emissions out of what would have been the smokestack, and using different sort of catalyzers turn that carbon that was going up the chimney into calcium carbonate. They basically turn it back into limestone, which can then become the sort of sand and gravel that the cement that’s being produced on the other side of the smokestack can glue together.
Jacob Deva Racusin: So basically capturing — typical carbon capture and storage kind of thing — you’re sort of taking all that sort of waste CO2 and catalyzing it back into limestone. And what’s really great about that, other than, like, taking what would otherwise be a destructive waste product and incorporating that into a value-added, you know, component of this, like, critical product, like, right within this close, short cycle, which makes it very tangible — the longevity of the capture of that carbon dioxide is quite significant when it’s bound in a more mineral-based, geologic form than when we’re talking about biogenic materials, which at whatever point the end of their service life is, has the potential to then be burned or decomposed or whatnot.
So there is a length of time at which that carbon gets captured, and in that process that’s, you know, a significantly longer storage window than working with something that could be pulled out of a wall in 10 to 70 years, and then you still have to do something safe with that bound carbon.
Chris Magwood: Yeah. So there’s a lot of sort of going on research-wise with that sort of, like, mineral capture. But it’s also not — it’s not widely available. It’s all sort of R&D prototype stuff. So I’m super excited about it.
Christophe Jospe: There goes somebody on a skateboard. Welcome to [unclear]. You wanted this to be quick. We’re not good at quick, we don’t really do quick. And let’s do one last one, and then we would be remiss if we didn’t say this one: agricultural residue.
Jacob Deva Racusin: Hmm. This kind of picks up off of the coconut coir framework. There is so much carboniferous, quote-unquote, waste coming off of agricultural production right now. And we call it waste because we have, again, a very reductionist approach to commodified agriculture [unclear]. So, like, corn husk — exactly. Yep. Corn husk is a great example. You know, cannabis production, all of the stalk, you know, straw from grain production, rice hulls. This is rice hulls. Yeah. Pretty much all this is biogenic. And so, like, like Chris is saying, you know, see what you have for waste material and, like, go towards that.
And we had this great conversation with someone at the conference — yeah, we just need to find, like, what are the material solutions for what our buildings need? Like, or you could see what all the opportunities in abundance of stored, banked carbon that just is out there, that is a quote-unquote waste product for that industry, and figure out how to build our buildings around that. And that’s how that cycle gets really closed, really quick. So we say agricultural residue — that’s the model.
Chris Magwood: And the thing that’s really exciting about building with ag residue is, when you posit solutions, especially sort of major material solutions, you’re often trying to create a whole new industry, you know. And when we talk about sort of sustainable wood, there’s a whole thing of, well, we’ve got to actually plant these forests and they take 40 to 60 years to grow. With the ag waste, it’s like right now, today, that stuff is planted everywhere in the world.
And, you know, one of the stats that I really like is just in grain straw — so just in the stalks of wheat, oats, barley, rye, things like that — just in those stalks, those plants on an annual basis draw down all the emissions from all transportation on the globe. So we already grow enough straw that it’s sucked all the CO2 from all our transportation into itself right now. We just then let that go. We burn it in the field, we let it moulder, you know, we use it as animal bedding and then compost it. And there’s great things about that, but in general all of that does end up back in the atmosphere.
And it’s like, there’s that opportunity — somebody’s planted it. Like, we don’t have to cut down any more stuff, we don’t have to make any more fields, you don’t have to do any land use change. There’s this opportunity, it’s already grown. Somebody’s driven a tractor over it, they’ve probably bundled it up somehow, and it’s just sitting there, got to, like, ripe to be stuck in a building.
Ross Kenyon: I’m pretty sure Amanda Ravenhill of the Buckminster Fuller Institute taught me, or maybe even us, this line. But Buckminster Fuller said something that I will now butcher, that is akin to: there is no such thing as pollution, only value we haven’t figured out how to capture. And I love that. Whenever someone says it’s waste, and they can turn it into value — that’s the most beautiful, creative, entrepreneurial event, or one of them, that I know of. And there it is for this climate crisis. You know, we’re wringing our hands over transportation. What do we do? What do we do? Well, while we’re figuring out what to do, we’re vacuuming it out of the air, these plants. Already, put them somewhere, you know, and do something useful, like make a building out of them.
Christophe Jospe: Or make biofuels out of them, possibly. Yeah, I just got back from ICAO. That’s in my mind right now. I just got back from Montreal a couple of days ago — so I told you earlier, I’m a little tired. It was a crazy trip. And New York before that. But anyways, ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization — they’re focusing a lot on two things, two parts to reducing emissions within aviation, which is biofuels or low-carbon fuels, and then offsetting the rest. Obviously carbon removal is the best way to do that.
But yeah, there was a lot of talk about, how do we look and find the supplies of waste, including agricultural waste, and then start using that waste to provide sustainable aviation fuels? So my question is, what’s happening now? Like, what are the things to do in order to aggregate or identify where the sources of waste are, and start aggregating them, so that we can find out whether it’s more appropriate for buildings, which is more appropriate for fuels — what, like, ground fuels or aviation fuels, what have you?
Chris Magwood: Yeah, I don’t know what the fuel, you know, use or impact is. I don’t know much about that at all. But our colleague who we presented with today sort of did some numbers that 10% of the straw grown just in the US annually could build two million homes. But currently this country builds about a million homes a year. So 10% of the straw that’s out there could — you’d replace all our other insulation materials, leaving lots for biofuel, still leaving some to put back into the soil.
Alexsandra Guerra: That’s a great number. Thank you for sharing that. Yeah, my mind’s blown a little bit. Like, mind-blowing emoji right now.
Chris Magwood: Yeah, but it’s about — it’s about two billion tonnes a year of grain straw. Like, so just that one category of ag waste is two billion tonnes a year in total, or that 2% annually, really, around the globe. [unclear]
Jacob Deva Racusin: I mean, there’s a lot of, like, there’s a lot of questions that come up for me around all of this. Like, can we find enough waste for us to not check our flight habits and to continue to build at the rate that we build? Like, I don’t think we have any real clear understanding of that, because we haven’t really done enough ecological resource mapping to fully understand what the bio potential is of these different parts of the ecosystems on the planet to supply what types of feedstock.
There’s Janine Benyus, who coined the term biomimicry. She has a company, Biomimicry 3.8, that works with — she’s partnered with a group of GIS mapping experts to look at different regions that are under development pressure and map the ecological services that those areas are providing. Could be stormwater retention, or carbon dioxide sequestration, or oxygen production, or, you know, any of these other, you know, migratory bird habitat, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And it now becomes a value proposition against the development: that either that ecological service needs to be still maintained in the development, or it needs to be, you know, offset in some other way.
And so that, for me, I see this additional overlap in looking at what quantities of what resources are available in which regions, and would best map to which other needed, previously petrochemical, fuel or feedstock materials, and find ways to connect those.
Alexsandra Guerra: Absolutely. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. And this is brilliant. So we do need to know more about all the resources. Maps like this would be helpful.
Christophe Jospe: I’ll just add that at that ICAO conference I saw a presentation by WWF, World Wildlife Fund, where they met — World Wrestling Federation? No, that’s it. Wow. That’s awesome. No, no, the cute little panda logo. But I think they are releasing a report that looks at the resources from an ecological perspective for these types of fuels or waste. So that might be a subset of what you’re talking about. But yeah, we should get that together there and share that.
Jacob Deva Racusin: But we know we don’t need to wait for that, because there’s a ton of straw, there’s a ton of material we’re already using. Like, we can start that immediately, while we’re also then projecting to the future, like, what are limits to growth and what are potentials for resources to support the growth we’ve identified we need.
Alexsandra Guerra: Well, thank you. Yeah, never wait and sit on your hands. Just do it now and plan for — paralysis by analysis is dangerous right now. It is, we need to go. We should do it. And there’s a theme here that I think also draws from the podcast we did with Fibershed, which is looking at sort of growing clothes in a 100-kilometre diameter and producing them, and not sending clothes millions and millions of miles, of times around the earth. And so similarly we’re talking about, like, find the regional activities and then figure out how to make buildings out of it. So I just — I really love that, and I think we can figure it out.
Christophe Jospe: I want to push back against, you can’t manage what you can’t measure, because I’m reading The Tyranny of Metrics. I knew he was going to do it. There’s a counterargument to say, like, paralysis by over-measuring, or measuring the wrong things. So it’s like — yes. Goodhart’s law, right? In the spirit of abundance. Yes. And, but we’re getting to the end of this. That sounded like just a palm slap. Maybe you want to comment on that?
Jacob Deva Racusin: He was laughing at something else. I just keep managing to hurt myself.
Ross Kenyon: I have one more question, which is really — I mean, we’re talking about building things that don’t last forever, and you obviously have to consider end-of-life issues. So how do you think about that, in the sort of carbon drawdown buildings that we’re describing here?
Jacob Deva Racusin: I mean, I’m not going to give you a completely direct answer, because most of my work is in existing buildings. So my immediate kind of response to that is, the burden should be heavy to require new construction, and then that new construction should be designed to last for an incredibly long time. Which is a very different paradigm than in which we’re engaging new construction right now. So that’s not really a direct—
Chris Magwood: Lasts, adaptable, and designed to be dismantle-able, you know, that whole notion. Of right now, the way we build buildings, if you don’t need that building in that place anymore, you just squish it up, you know. But you could take it apart and put it together somewhere else, or add it to another building somewhere else. And I think that’s really, like, a way to extend the life too.
Jacob Deva Racusin: But, I mean, to be maybe a little more direct, speaking around, like, the materials that we’re advocating for and, like, what would happen at some point to them: there’s kind of like a host of different options, which that alone is enough for me. I mean, right now, again, I engage in existing buildings that have had spray foam insulation installed into them, and literally every single piece of material that is touched by that insulation is landfill. Like, do not pass go, do not collect $200. There’s nothing else you get to do with these concentrations of toxic styrenes, like, physically bound to whatever it happens to be touching.
So, at least in this case, we’ve got a host of materials — again, it could be turned into biochar, it could be reincorporated back into building. I’ve actually, when we’ve had to get into an attic and do our ceiling, like, we’ll suck out the cellulose and reinstall it, which is completely unheard of with many different types of insulation materials.
Chris Magwood: Yeah, I mean, you know, you’re talking about fuel in 50 years — the stuff that’s coming out of the buildings is a viable fuel stock. Like, I think there’s lots of things that we can do later.
Alexsandra Guerra: This makes me really, like, hopeful. And it almost makes me want to, like, live longer and live to be 200 years old, because I feel like we’re just starting now and we’re learning so much from history and what we can do. And we’re like, yo, why would you use toxic things? And it’s a little harsh, because they didn’t have the knowledge and the awareness of the impacts of what they were doing. They’re like, oh, something cheap that would help us live and build a building. So that was mean and I shouldn’t have done that. But I really wish I could live, like, to be two hundred, four hundred years — 100 years ago — and see, like, how do we solve this problem? And hopefully we do, and I think we will, but it might be a little painful.
Chris Magwood: Yeah. It might be a little painful. People might have to feel some serious hurt before they start to change. And one of the things — the reason I’ve been a fan of your podcast and what you guys are doing is that the great thing about this sort of carbon storage in buildings thing is it’s actually pretty darn easy to measure, you know? Like, it’s not — you know, and this is one of the things with energy efficiency in buildings which, you know, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for energy-efficient buildings. But when you design an energy-efficient building you make a computer model and you go, okay, this is how much energy this building is going to use, and then that’s what everybody uses — governments and everybody — to say, wow, there’s the carbon footprint of that building.
But if it was not built well, if the occupant isn’t, you know, functioning in their proper — like, there’s all of these things that can skew those numbers, that they can be just so wrong. But we know that if we put a pound of straw in a wall, it’s 48 percent carbon, and that’s how much is in there. And unless the owner, like, busts down the wall and rips it out and throws it on the lawn, it’s going to stay there. And it’s going to stay in a pretty highly regulated world — like, you don’t tear buildings down without the government knowing that the building is, you know, being torn down. So for you guys trying to go, how do we know if x amount of carbon has actually been stored — this is a great medium, you know.
Christophe Jospe: It’s like, wait, [unclear] — the methodology’s written. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Oh, and by the way, these methodologies are not proprietary to Nori. We’re just building a marketplace, so we’re super excited to, like, build something that will enable the generation of carbon removal certificates in the buildings. I tried not to link this back to Nori, but I just did. Sorry.
Alexsandra Guerra: I want to turn this back around to you guys. I’ve learned a lot on this episode, I’m sure our listeners have too. For our listeners who are now super jazzed up, they think everything you’re doing is amazing — one, what can they do? And where can they go to find out more information?
Jacob Deva Racusin: I mean, one of the greatest resources right now for folks curious about embodied carbon is the Carbon Leadership Forum and the Embodied Carbon Network, of which we are members, and based here at the University of Washington.
Christophe Jospe: That’s right, exactly. I mean, for another — I’m bashful to admit that we had Kate Simonen on and I was like, we’re going to join that, and we haven’t yet. So we probably should now, for the second time. I’m going to commit us to it. Yeah, we’re doing it. Yep. Joining now. It’s public now. You’ve announced it — outed ourselves the second time.
Jacob Deva Racusin: And honestly, I get really, really excited and would love to see more of the folks that are really excited about regenerative agriculture and regenerative silviculture — those talking to the folks, those of us that are into regenerative buildings, talking a lot more. And so, like, there are so many different points of intervention, but some of the things I’m excited about is — all right, so folks are looking at ag, looking at forestry and whatnot: like, hey, we’re really excited to talk with you about getting more of those materials to work together and aligning those industries. That’s first and foremost on my mind just in real time, which is why I’m mentioning that out loud.
Chris Magwood: Yeah, and I think too that this whole area really lends itself to a really cool model of sort of micro-factories, you know. Here’s a farm producing, you know, 200 tonnes of straw a year. That farmer, or somebody right there, could turn that into building material on farm and get it to a local city, and really sort of build up regional manufacturing on a much smaller, distributed scale. Like, you know, the reductionist thing would be like, cool, there’s lots of rice straw in California, let’s ship it to Vermont, you know, and throw it on trucks and, you know, drive it across the country.
But the agriculture is happening everywhere. And so, it’s exciting to think — so you sort of talk about the link with the growers, but also with people who are into manufacturing. Like, you know, there’s this opportunity for real employment and innovation and, like, really useful carbon-storing manufacturing, small manufacturing, that sort of is where all of these things kind of meet.
Jacob Deva Racusin: And back on the building side, if you mean more, like, a tangible, like, organizational information or resource — Architecture 2030 is doing, like, a whole lot of looking at this, and in particular their Carbon Smart Materials Palette is being developed and released, which really captures and catalogs a lot of the best materials to be using for, you know, direct embodied carbon response. And we’ve actually both been involved in helping to fill out that palette a bit, and part of the Carbon Leadership Forum’s renewable materials working group has been, you know, really spearheading a lot of the materials being highlighted on that palette. So a lot of crossover in those communities.
Chris Magwood: Yeah, and we’re really excited to start taking this to the policy side. You know, there were so many people at this conference and elsewhere — there’s the sustainability director of New York City sort of really talking about buildings in a meaningful way — and we sort of want to try to get our foot in the door and go, like, make sure it’s, you know, you’re not just encouraging everything getting blasted with the spray foam. Like, you’ve got the right idea, but yeah, to really try to sort of intervene at that level, because good policy now would make a huge difference in sort of encouraging this to happen.
Alexsandra Guerra: Those are really excellent ideas, and that’s one of the things that we love about this podcast, is because people vote with their wallet, they also can vote with sending a letter, or a strongly, strongly worded letter, to their local representative, or a phone call to say, hey, this stuff matters. And it seems like you’ve given some really actionable steps that people can voice their opinions on. Thanks so much for coming on. This has been great.
Christophe Jospe: You didn’t say it, so I will: if you’re interested in finding these guys, you can go to Endeavour Centre — that’s with an O-U and an R-E — dot org. And if you like the show, please share it. If you especially like this one, if it’s your first time, thanks — please subscribe, rate us, review us on iTunes. We’ve got a weekly newsletter, Nori.com. Subscribe, we’ll hook you up, and you’ll get all sorts of great content that we talked about, and you can stay informed with that progress. Ross, did I miss anything?
Ross Kenyon: Oh, you’re good. Yeah, and NewFrameworks.com. NewFrameworks.com. And see you next time.
