Home sweet home: building an eco house requires holistic thinking.

Building an Eco House Requires Holistic Thinking

This is the first in a new series of columns about realizing environmental ideals on the homefront. For some people, it's easier to talk about saving the Earth than it is to actually live those principles daily. The column will be about practical environmental ideas, from alternatives to the all-American lawn to non-toxic home insulation and water-saving toilets. In the first installment, Juliet Cuming tries to define what makes a house an eco home.

What exactly is an "eco home"? There is so much that goes into the creation of any home that it is a daunting task to try to consider its full environmental impact. There are many model eco homes in both North America and Europe. Built by architects, construction companies, visionaries and community groups, these houses run the gamut from weird and wonderful to so conventional as to be indistinguishable from the typical American modular home.

Even in the most carefully planned eco home, for every one feature that is successfully "greened," there are a dozen that are not. From "natural" homes of mud and straw to "recycled" houses build with a myriad of reworked materials, everyone has their own ideas about green living, and invariably important features are left by the wayside. But it's fascinating to see the vastly different attempts to balance the "three Rs": reduce, reuse and recycle.

As indoor air pollution and chemical sensitivity problems come to the fore, there has been increased attention to the effect of building materials on a home's occupants. Unfortunately, many of the materials that promote energy efficiency (insulations and foams) or recycling (recycled plastics and rubber) contribute to indoor air-quality problems. This makes many of the super-insulated eco-homes built in the 1970s and early 1980s anathema to the chemically sensitive. Thus the first caveat of eco-home building - stay humble!

The Dream Eco-Home

The ideal eco-home would be built in a place where it will have as little negative impact as possible on the plants, wildlife and humans in the area. Perhaps built on or around the remains of a pre-existing structure, the excavation and disruption of the landscape will be minimal. The home will be sited and designed to take advantage of shade in the summer and sun in the winter. Everything in the house will be biodegradable, built with materials that originate from or near the building site.

The entire home will breathe, ensuring that the indoor air quality will always be high, without sacrificing heat or coolness. By filtering the outside air through thick natural walls, the home will always have comfortable levels of humidity. The only energy used for electricity will come from the sun, wind and water on the site.

Furnished and decorated with a myriad of styles and colors (because in the 1990s, "eco" does not mean drab or dowdy), the home will be both comfortable and chic. Using plasters, stains, paints and fabrics colored with naturally derived pigments and dyes, it will not sacrifice texture or vibrancy in achieving its goal of ecological purity.

Working with neighboring crafts people, the home's owner will stimulate the local economy by buying from the surrounding community everything that cannot be salvaged or crafted. The eco-home will not be bought or made, it will grow organically with the help of nature and her enthusiastic co-creators.

Passing the Test

There are seven criteria which subject home building and decorating materials to a comprehensive analysis, and can assist in determining "true cost." Similar to the "cradle-to-grave" analysis being developed by the American Institute of Architecture's (AIA) Green Building Council and a host of independent organizations, this "true cost" rating determines the long-term effect of a material.

1. Does your home plan reduce energy and resources? (in the extraction, production, transport and maintenance of materials);

2. Does it reuse existing resources? (i.e., no additional energy or materials are used to process);

3. If it doesn't reuse existing resources altogether, does your home plan recycle existing resources?

4. Is it healthy to producers and occupants and also to the installers of the materials?

5. Is it biodegradable once it's no longer usable?

6. Is your plan affordable and available?

7. Will your home be durable?

Creating an "eco-home" isn't easy; it takes a lot of thought and independent research. We usually live far away from the sources of the products we buy, and don't see the impact of our purchases on either the environment or the people who produce them. From the tiles we use on our roofs to the lumber for building and the fabrics we use on our beds, very few of us have any involvement in, or awareness of, the raw materials, production/finishing methods and transport necessary to make these items available to us. Part of creating a responsible and ecological home is finding this out.

JULIET CUMING, who lives in West Dummerston, Vermont, is a producer of Earth Sweet Home, an environmental television show.