Home, green home.

The Green Dream House doesn't seem out of place among the surrounding Victorian-style homes in McCook, Nebraska. "When you drive by, you don't think, 'That looks recycled,'" says Bruce Maine, a sustainable design manager with the Omaha-based architectural consulting firm HDR and a member of the task force that designed the house. And that's the point. The board of directors behind America Recycles Day, which raffled off the house as part of its yearly campaign to promote awareness of recycled products, wants people to know that green building materials can be commonplace--even in middle America.

Recycling benefits the environment by reducing the need for landfill space and incineration. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 1999 recycling and composting prevented about 64 million tons of material from ending tip in landfills and incinerators. And by reducing the need to extract and process virgin materials, recycling conserves natural resources such as water, timber, and minerals, and reduces pollution and the emission of greenhouse gases.

The Nebraska house was the national grand prize for the fifth annual America Recycles Day in 2001 and was raffled off in a random drawing from more than 6.2 million pledges to recycle more and buy recycled products. "It's one thing to recycle, but if you're not buying products that have recycled content, then there won't be a market for your recyclables," says Steve Andrews, a program specialist with the Nebraska State Recycling Association. America Recycles Day is held each November 15.

The winner of the house, which was completed in July 2003, chose its location and some of its design features. Recycled products used in the house include carpet made of 25-100% recycled polyethylene (plastic bottles) and a roof made of recycled steel. When the useful life of the house is over, the steel roof can be recycled again, Andrews says.

Other sustainable features of the house include natural linoleum, which is made of linseed oil, resins, and wood flour. It's biodegradable and, unlike vinyl, is not associated with releases of potential toxicants in its manufacture and disposal. The designers also chose paint and adhesives that contain no volatile organic compounds, which can cause eye, nose, and throat irritation, headache, nausea, and damage to the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system.

The house was framed using insulating concrete forms, or ICFs, made of expanded polystyrene (which doesn't deplete the ozone layer) and filled with concrete and reinforcing bars (which are generally 99% recycled steel). Using ICFs requires little to no use of wood on the exterior of a building. Coupled with a well-insulated roof and foundation, ICF walls can save as much as 50% on heating and cooling bills. And, Maine says, "You end up with a house that is incredibly strong and could well withstand high winds"--an important feature in a storm-prone area such as Nebraska.

The designers further improved the ICFs by replacing 20% of the cement in the concrete with fly ash, a by-product of coal burning from electrical power generation. The use of fly ash in cement reduces the need for limestone calcination, a process that uses a large amount of energy, usually generated by burning fossil fuels. For every ton of fly ash used to replace cement in concrete, approximately 0.8 ton of carbon dioxide is prevented from being released into the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

That use of fly ash in the ICFs is an exciting feature and is very significant in reducing the environmental impact of the house, says Nadav Malin, editor of Environmental Building News. The rest of the house's features are good choices, he says, and builders who employ alternative building methods use these features regularly.

Andrews says the house was designed to showcase environmentally friendly building features that the average homeowner can easily obtain. "I wanted to hit people with readily available products," he says. Even if a store doesn't keep the materials in stock, they can be ordered easily, as long as the buyer knows what to ask for. "We're trying to educate the consumer so they can go into a home supply store and ask the right questions," he says.

Such materials are also affordable. The Green Dream House was built for about $103 per square foot, compared to the average cost for building a new house in Nebraska of $100 per square foot.

The America Recycles Day grand prizes vary each year. The 2001 house was the third and most recent house given away. For 2003, the grand prize was a 2004 Ford Focus partial zero-emissions vehicle, which achieves the cleanest rating in the Environmental Protection Agency's Green Vehicle Guide and is built with some recycled components.