Other products for sustainable flooring indoors include Showercork, which is made from 100% renewable raw materials, and organic carpet made by Corniche Carpet Mills by only using jute and latex.

If outdoors, products such as Airostone Corp, GraniteCrete, and TerraPave, each offer different types of sustainable pathways for small or large scale purposes.  Each have different designs and are compressed to last a long time.

Here are some shots from the top of one of my buildings in San Francisco:

Standard Tar and Gravel roof, very old school.  And let me tell you, if you are up there on a sunny day, it is flippen hot.  Here are my neighbors:

Lots of different roof types and colors, the first looks like a silvery modified bitumen type, light colored but not white.  The next is a black and then brown but still dark roofing material, and its the color alone that matters.  Multiply those roofs over the whole city and that is some serious heat being trapped.  According to many media outlets,so lets pick the LA Times, globally roofs account for 25% of the surface of most cities, and asphalt another 35%.  “If all were switched to reflective material in 100 major urban areas, it would offset 44 metric gigatons of greenhouse gases”  LA Times Sept 2008.  Full science behind the claim can be found from the 2008 Edition of the Journal Climate Change.

This is in general well known stuff, pretty common sense, (see Ice Chest example above) and in general still not well appreciated.  There are those who argue for really space aged approaches to climate change, like the Geoengineers who sound really cool with plans to do things like “mimicking the effect of large volcanoes by spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to diminish solar radiation”.  But for me, I prefer practical things that can be done right now.

Well, it won’t save a gigaton, maybe a few hundred pounds over the next 20 years, but my contribution on the eve of Copenhagen is a new white roof.  It was a necessary repair, the roof was leaking, and it has real environmental value too.  When the time comes, I will whiten up my tar and gravel roof above as well.  And that is how it should be.  If you own older buildings like I do, or an older home, eventually you will need to put on a new roof.  When you do, do your part, make it white.

Michael Reynolds, architect, developer, visionary of the Earthship Biotecture may be a bit hippy dippy at first, but his point is damn well taken: housing can be constructed to have a no resource footprint.  His communities are true models for long term sustainable living.  Thinking about our future, housing must be built this way; we cannot consume at our current level, the global changes already underway are catastrophic enough without us continuing to dig the hole deeper.

The following piece will give you a taste of his vision, and if you want more watch the documentary Garbage Warrior – it will give you that kick in the ass you need.

I know what I would like to do – make one of these in the middle of San Francisco.  Now all I need to do is figure out how.

But millions of tons of fly ash can be used in concrete.  The ash replaces Portland Cement, and cement production releases millions of tons of CO2 into the air every year – you have to heat limestone up to 1300 degrees to turn it into cement, and that fire creates the CO2.  Concrete is the most common man made construction material used in the planet – 100s of millions of cubic yards are used each year.  Every time someone does something as simple as a driveway or sidewalk repair, they can help out the environment by using some fly ash.  My own little job used 4.5 cubic yards of concrete, with 15% of the cement replaced by fly ash from Bode Concrete of San Francisco’s sidewalk mix. My man Sal “Rocky” DeGuarda did the job for me, I recommend him for jobs in San Francisco.

You have to ask for it, and your contractors will get it for you.  People want to be responsible, because we all want a better world for our kids.

The homes themselves are nice.  They have a number of Sustainable Features that are an honest if not 100% stab at green building (Of the 3 toilets I saw, only one was dual flush…why not all three I wonder?), on demand hot water (not sustainable imho), Trex Decking (decent), solar photovoltaic panels (good), energy star appliances & bathroom fans, (applause), etc, etc.

I am happy to see developers give a nod to green building, though much props also must go to Mayor Newsom whose advocacy of green building principles mandated this kind of thinking in new construction.  Only mandated action through legislation will force people to build this way.  And it really must be mandated in the building code otherwise we will continue to ignore real environmental costs associated with buildings until the balance becomes so great, our children can’t pay the interest and the planet gets foreclosed on.

More green building reviews to come soon.

Resource exploitation is one of the foundations of growth.  The global economy cannot produce all the outputs needed for capitalism to survive without raw material for production.  Most of the harvesting of these raw materials happen in far off places like Gabon, and most consumers do not care if some poor black or brown tribe gets stepped on in the name of progress.  But it is the basics, things like iron, steel and wood, that goes into our structures when we build.  If we don’t become conscious of what we are using on the back end, communities like Marc’s, and in the end our own as well, will fall.

Marc has been a grass roots leader in Gabon, leading his NGO “Brainforest” to advocate for the rights of the people and environment of Gabon in the face of international resource acquisition.  His work has lead to threats, arrest and restrictions for both him and his family, but he continues to press for sustainable policies in Gabon & by extension, here in the US.