recycled-materials / Green Building & Sustainable Home Renovation Information & Advice

The cost of every item we purchase is determined in part by the price of oil. This includes products that are in no way petroleum based, since material extraction, manufacturing and transportation will in one way or another, rely at least in part on oil. As the price of oil continues to rise, the money saved by employi...

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...

b sq. Design Studio Inc. is a Toronto-based landscape design and build firm that endeavours to create elegant and modern landscapes with a focus on sustainability and longevity for their work. “Plug and Play – the Pallet Garden” is their 5th feature garden installation for the annual Canada Blooms Garden Festival. Bui...

They might be parked a little more precisely than an auto wrecking yard, but that doesn’t mean theses planes will ever fly again. Decommissioned aircraft have been declared so, because they have reached the end of their safe flying days. While most of us might be fine riding in rusty old cars, few of us would climb int...

Officially billed as displaying the best of 'carbon minimalism', Third Quadrant Design's Third Space Commons building combines the best of sustainable design with intelligent recycling of materials.  It includes a portland cement / concrete-free build and extensive use of innovative green building materials like hemp a...

When buildings are decommissioned there can be a lot of valuable materials that could be used again, but when buyers can’t find sellers, otherwise usable materials are being sent to a land fill. There is a growing amount of used building materials that can be found at online classified websites such as Craigslist and K...

1. Asphalt shingles: Asphalt shingles © Ecohome We’ll start with shingles to get it out of the way, because choosing an eco-friendly, durable roof covering starts first with dismissing any idea of installing asphalt shingles. High-embodied energy, rarely if ever recycled, they deteriorate rapidly with UV rays, emit s...

Healthier kitchen components - countertops If you're into healthy green homes like we are here at Ecohome, there's a lot to think about when choosing a healthier kitchen. Firstly, some beautiful kitchen cabinets, preferably built from FSC certified woods and formaldehyde-free plywood boxes, and that's even before choos...

Introduction: Why carbon reduction matters in construction As global awareness of climate change grows, the construction industry has traditionally focused on improving the thermal performance of buildings, which involves adding more construction materials to a basic built home. As the construction industry becomes mor...

Hemp is a very sustainable construction material that is no longer just a fringe product; rather, it is becoming a more accessible mainstream building product, most notably as hemp-batt insulation, and also hemp boards for cabinetry.  Why choose hemp building materials? The growing and harvesting of hemp is a far more ...

The current fate of older homes is typically one of demolition, sadly, rather than deconstruction. The relatively low-cost of the industrial waste stream has made it cheaper and more profitable to indiscriminately tear down a home and load it into dumpsters for removal.   This approach results in rapidly filling landfi...