environmentally-friendly-insulation / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

All materials will have a history, the pros and cons of which will need to be weighed. Unfortunately there isn’t always an obvious right or wrong answer as to whether or not something is a sustainable material. The design of your home, where you live and your lifestyle are all factors that determine what the most ecolo...

The best way to reduce waste is to plan ahead to keep it at a minimum; here are some suggestions on how you can do that: Design your house with reduced waste in mind by keeping the plans at sensible dimensions. If you plan lengths to be 4 and 8 foot increments instead of 5 and 9, this makes the best use of industry st...

Dense-packed cellulose insulation - the History In 2005, Metric Homes of Carp, Ontario designed and built Canada's first Energy Star labelled home in Canada. This home was built with dense-packed (or dense-blown) cellulose as the wall insulation of choice. Their intent was to produce a better built home with the goal o...

Hemp insulation manufactured in Canada! Nature Fibres is a young company based in the town of Asbestos, Quebec, which began manufacturing hemp insulation in the winter of 2018. As the town’s name suggests, it was heavily reliant on the manufacturing of asbestos, but those mining and manufacturing facilities are closing...

Shipping container homes are gaining popularity globally, especially as Tiny Houses, as they can be seductively attractive with their modern looking lines, colours and shape - but one question we've been asked consistently is: "Are shipping containers Good or Bad as homes - and for the Environment?"  Like many great id...

Natural building insulation materials In order to combat the climate change impact of the built environment, natural insulation materials such as hemp insulation, cellulose, wood fiber and grass insulation help us meet emission targets because they act as carbon storage. We are living in a time when the embodied energy...

Crawlspace insulation - be careful to get it right A crawlspace comes with all the downsides of a basement, but it is just too low a space to be functional either beyond the folded plastic christmas tree and a couple of boxes of baubles. Unless there is a good reason for it, going through the process of pouring a footi...

  Insulating a basement is a great idea if it wasn't insulated when built, as before we began insulating foundation walls and below slabs (see slab on grade), it was generally estimated that basement heat loss accounted for about 1/3 of the total heat loss of a house. It is likely that such an abysmal starting place ma...

Alternatives to grass lawns - ground covers!  North American backyards have one main point in common – Kentucky blue grass. But here we’re talking about ground covers and alternatives to this grass, not a bunch of fiddle and banjo players jamming in your backyard.  The traditional green grass we use to cover our front ...

Polyisocyanurate (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS), Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) or Styrofoam? When building or renovating a high-performance building envelope there are really three main kinds of rigid foam panels you are going to have to choose from - Polyisocyanurate known as Polyiso (PIR), Extruded Polystyrene (XPS) ...

The tiny house movement is a fascinating trend that draws attention to one of the greatest problems with the housing industry; how big our homes have become. But the custom homes being built on trailer beds have many limitations, mainly because they need to comply with the rules of the road as a vehicle. So they aren’t...