Rice, straw and coconut the new alternatives to wood
By Fiona Graham Technology of business reporter, BBC News
Rice with that: Could one of the world's most ubiquitous staples hold the key to saving tropical hardwood trees?
You've found the house of your dreams.
Or it will be when the renovations are done. After years of grotty flats and poky "starter homes" that ended up being second and third homes too, that windfall from great-aunt Annie is going to be put to good use.
More than anything you want to have some beautiful timber features both inside and out - but without destroying a small corner of the Amazon basin to do it.
Would your next thought be rice? Possibly not.
Swelling and splintering
Resysta may look like wood, and be used like wood, but the main ingredient is rice husks.
"The idea was to create a new environmentally friendly material that could replace a variety of natural building materials, like stone and in particular tropical hardwood, for all uses where water creates difficulties," says Bernd Duna, managing director of Resysta International GmbH.
"Demand for wood such as teak has boomed in recent decades, making it into a profitable export, yet the long growth cycle of hardwood trees and the difficulty of certifying origin has meant the de facto existence of a large unregulated 'grey market' that preys on mature forests."
Resysta being used in a Hong Kong park
The husks are powdered, mixed with salt and mineral oil and pressed into board. Mr Duna says the material looks like tropical hardwood, but has certain advantages.
"It cannot absorb water, which causes wood to swell, warp and splinter.
"Secondly, wood contains a compound called lignin which leads to greying - but as rice husks are mainly cellulose, they do not have this compound and so the material maintains its original appearance."
The recyclable material has won awards for its sustainability credentials - using a widely available agricultural by-product to conserve hardwood stocks.
Resysta is more expensive than more traditional alternatives, and is designed for exterior use. The company will also recycle it at the end of its usefulness.
Jörg Sperling is a partner at clean-tech private equity firm WHEB Partners, which has invested heavily in the business.
"There's a lot of interest in sustainable building. You have large operators of hotels or shopping malls, supermarkets - they want to give their properties a green look.
"Consumer awareness is driving this. People are looking for viable alternatives to wood where you have the green credentials, but still you have material that's easy to maintain."
Straw houses
Kirei board is made from sorghum straw
Straw as a building material may have a bad reputation among pigs, but a California company has developed a technology to challenge that assumption.
Kirei board is made from sorghum stalks, another renewable agricultural by-product that would otherwise be burnt or make its way to landfill.
This is a material designed for its aesthetic appeal - kirei is Japanese for beautiful - with customers globally including Starbucks, McDonald's, Hilton and Google.
"Green has to be beautiful," says company founder John Stein.
"If you're going to do green for green's sake you're going to have a very limited market - people who have health issues or people with a conscience.
"If you have beautiful materials that happen to be green, then really they're open to everybody. I regard it almost as a gateway drug to other green activities."
Kirei USA's John Stein says that "green has to be beautiful"
Currently, the board is produced at the company's plant in Asia, but there are plans to expand production to other areas of the world.
A no-added-urea formaldehyde adhesive is used, with bio-based binding agents in the pipeline.
"I think there's a large potential for new materials being developed every day using what were once considered to be agricultural waste products.
"We're reclaiming them, and turning them into valuable building materials."
In terms of cost, Mr Stein says it is comparable to mid-range hardwoods. The company also produces a wheat-based MDF alternative, hemp panels, coconut mosaic tile, and a range of bamboo products.
Illegal harvesting
Using hardwoods of course isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"The whole problem is with tropical hardwoods," says Andrew Lawrence, timber specialist at Arup, a founding member of the UK Green Building Council.
"Those are the ones where there's a general problem with a lot of unsustainable, illegal harvesting."
Tropical hardwood being offloaded in Indonesia
His colleague Dr Kristian Steele, senior consultant specialising in materials and sustainability, agrees.
"Temperate hardwoods [such as beech and oak, found in North America and Europe] represent much less of a problem.
"To use it isn't fundamentally wrong, you just need to use it in the right way, and ensure your procurement processes are proper in terms of where you're supplying and purchasing from."
In general, softwoods grow faster than hardwoods, which means that they can be harvested earlier, and are rapidly replaced.
There are always exceptions - eucalyptus is a hardwood, yet has a growth cycle of just 20-30 years.
Deforestation of the rainforest areas where many hardwood species grow has been linked to climate change and has a devastating impact on bio-diversity and the water cycle.
Across the developed world businesses are being forced to consider sustainability, as governments try to clamp down on the use of unsustainable tropical hardwoods.
Choosing FSC-certified (Forest Stewardship Council) wood means it has been sustainably sourced.
Assessing your green building material can be a complicated balancing act.
"When we talk about sustainability of materials, we want to look at the impacts and the benefits.
"There might be a whole host of criteria that frame impacts and benefits.
"So you end up with quite a complex set of parameters against which you're judging materials, and that may change depending on what it's being used for."
Conker champion
The pine goes into the reactor for acetylation at Accsys Arnhem plant
Softwoods such as pine are traditionally less stable, less durable and more prone to bleaching than their more stoic sisters.
Put them through a process known as acetylation, however, and that could change everything.
Chief executive of AIM-listed Accsys Technologies Paul Clegg explains how it works: "I don't know if you've ever played conkers, but in order to make your conker harder you would soak it in vinegar and stick it in the oven.
"In essence what you do there is acetylate the conker. You make it harder and you make it much more stable."
Radiata pine is loaded into one of two reactors at the company's plant in Arnhem in the Netherlands.
A vacuum is created and then flooded with a liquid called acetic anhydride - effectively industrial vinegar - which is sucked into the spaces in the wood.
Chemistry lesson: How acetylation works
It is heated to start the reaction, and when it is complete the resins, residual acetic anhydride and acetic acid are wicked away from the wood, and the pine has become Accoya.
The result, says Mr Clegg, is a material that has the look and feel of hardwood, but that is stronger, more stable, durable and longer-lasting.
"What we don't know is whether it ever rots.
"We know it lasts for 50 years above ground. You can burn it, chip it and recycle it so it doesn't become a problem, but it's an 'at least' number not a maximum," Mr Clegg says.
An independent report carried out by research institute Scion found Accoya was more durable than the most durable hardwoods.
This bridge in the Netherlands city of Sneek is made of Accoya
The company has had ups and downs in recent years. Mr Clegg joined in 2009, and the business now has a new board, management team and structure.
Accoya is used around the world, from a velodrome in Tbilisi, to decking on the Shanghai Bund and Disney theme parks. The company hopes to license the technology to others, and is working on Tricoya, an acetylated MDF that can be left outdoors untreated, unlike regular MDF.
"We've gone beyond the tipping point," Mr Clegg says.
"Sustainability or responsible behaviour amongst consumers or corporations is becoming ingrained in society."
Arup's Dr Kristian Steele feels business now has little choice in the matter.
"The reason business should be specifying sustainable materials is not that it's just ethically the right thing to do, but for commercial longevity it's going to be the right thing to do as well," he says.
UCSF, never one to shy away from a challenge, has recently opened not one, but three new green laboratories:
The $4.985 million renovation of the UCSF School of Dentistry Mesenchymal and Craniofacial Research Laboratory actually was completed two months ahead of schedule becoming the third UCSF laboratory to receive LEED-CI Gold certification.
The floor plan consists of two large open labs with 28 benches separated by a core of common spaces for equipment, cold room, tissue labs, microscopy rooms and a shared histology core, as well as five principal investigator offices, with conference and break room areas.
Suspended on the steep hillside of UCSF’s Parnassus campus, the new green Ray and Dagmar Regenerative Medicine Building supports 25 UCSF scientists and their teams to understand the basic biology of stem cells and to translate those discoveries into medical therapies for presently incurable diseases and debilitating injuries.
Aesthetic and sustainable principles are reflected in the building’s design. Unique green features include: built-in recycling containers in strategic locations, more than 90 percent of areas have access to natural light, and a terraced, green roof that functions as open space for scientists and staff as well as providing additional roofing insulation. This reduces the heat island effect and reduces water pollution.
Comments in chronological order (Total 27 comments)
10 May 2011 6:13PM
I applaud the idea; while being slightly skeptical these ideas need testing. But can you please stop referring to it as a city? It's a town.
10 May 2011 6:18PM
And..........
Is it any good? Do what you like? what are its flaws? and Is it as sustainable as it claimed?
This is not the first article on the city in the Guardian and so should be deeper than the previous ones. I am sure your articles are still of a high quality in the AJ but this article is verging on Polly Filler territory.
10 May 2011 6:31PM
Visiting Egypt as a tourist some years ago, the cool of the 3000 year old mud brick buildings was a revelation. But they were neglected and crumbling: ferociously air conditioned concrete slab construction was all the rage. If Masdar helps make the clever old methods chic and fashionable again, it will do some good. But so far it sounds more like a theme park than a real place.
And 'Arriving by road from Abu Dhabi – there will be a train in years to come ...' sounds ominous. They left space down Milton Keynes' boulevards for the tram system that was going to be built as soon as there were enough residents to make it viable. That day will never dawn because, in the absence of trams, residents adopted car dependent patterns of life that could not now use trams even if they magically appeared. Compare and contrast Vienna where you have to put the tram line in before residents move in to new housing areas. Sustainability requires dirigiste planning and public service investment as well as clever low-resource architecture. The high tech gadgets - the bit most people get excited about - are a distraction.
10 May 2011 6:36PM
I visited Masdar in March, to film a video that includes footage of it and write about transport aspects of its development. The piece is quite right to pick up on quite how pleasant a place it is. In a region where most modern cities go in for wide streets that are vulnerable to the glare of the sun, the squares with their fountains and so on are genuinely reminiscent of Seville, Tangiers or one of the liveable old cities built to withstand such harsh environments.
I also found it astonishing the pods didn't crash - I had a fright at one point when I saw one apparently on a collision course with ours, before realising that it was the reflection of ours in some glass.
But it is a real problem that Abu Dhabi's planned metro won't reach Masdar for a long time. It seems strange to have a zero-carbon city that can only really be reached by car. The other issue is how widely applicable the lessons from Masdar are. It's fine building such a development as a one-off in oil-rich Abu Dhabi. The question is whether its lessons in sustainability will be learnt in places that have already developed in a far less sustainable fashion.
10 May 2011 9:39PM
I met an architect today who was looking for any septic tank.
It seems the job of architects is much harder than ordinary people might be thinking.
11 May 2011 1:15AM
I think the author has misinterpreted the design of this eco-city. The basic concept was to build a platform for the buildings that would allow a lower level, called an undercroft, to be used for PodCar circulation withing the city. Cost cutting measures have eliminated the undercroft along with the use of PodCars for internal circulation. The street system is not suitable for driven autos and it lacks connectivity and suitable widths and parking spaces which have to be airconditioned. A complete redesign is therefore going to be necessary. The article says that cars and lorries will circulate by using an undercroft that has been abandoned to save money. Someone at the Guardian needs to talk to someone at Foster+Partners to get this issue clarified.
11 May 2011 1:50AM
I am not an architect and my understanding of urban design may be seriously faulty. But I'd been under the impression that a town lacked consciousness, let alone volition or reproductive abilities, and that it instead was built and maintained by people -- typically, by poorly paid, dark-skinned people (in the Gulf, typically from such nations as Bangladesh and the Philippines). Where will these people live? (Or doesn't this matter as long as white people in suits are comfortable?)
11 May 2011 2:18AM
Hmm. I guess that means you don't like the styling of them. Or maybe you just find riding in a driverless car freaky. Are they over designed, though? Apart from being computer controlled, they're very simple electric cars. It's only when you think about what they're doing that they reveal what they're offering -- taxi-like service at bus-like prices.
afaik, they drive at a steady 25 km/h (16 mph), which may seem slow (compared to typical urban speed limits), but is considerably faster than the average speed of traffic in most cities, and a lot faster than walking. Their very steady speed is one of the things that makes them green. Meanwhile, the reason they don't crash is that they're not bumbling; they move with the sort of millimetre precision you would expect from computer-driven vehicles.
Actually, the original idea was to have the pods on elevated guideways above street level, but someone decided underground was better. This led to the undercroft idea. Originally, also, cars of the human-driven sort were to be banned. The podcars got killed because someone changed their mind about human-driven cars, and the podcars were in the way. A drastic reduction of budget combined with the high cost of the undercroft provided the excuse.
So, no more podcars at Masdar, it would seem. Never mind, have you seen the Heathrow ones?
11 May 2011 5:30AM
Anyone living in a large energy dependent city should applaud this approach...
my own house, by design uses 10% of the average British household energy annually...
11 May 2011 5:54AM
Those undercrofts look perfect for cycling in.
11 May 2011 6:36AM
I moved from London to Abu Dhabi last year and now live a ten minute drive away from Masdar City. I visited it recently when it held it's first 'festival day' which was a great opportunity for the public to see the various 'green' companies in the area as well as learn about the effects our lifestyle have on the environment. (It was also great to see emiratis and expats together, which to be honest doesn't happen as much as it perhaps should do but I digress...)
Pollution is a real issue in Abu Dhabi and an excessive use of plastic bags has led to a huge rise in camel deaths in the UAE. There was, until recently, a general lack of interest in recycling and being environmentally friendly (its not just the emirati community I refer to, I see plenty of my fellow Westerners not even bother to use the recycling bins provided) and I feel that Masdar and what it represents, is a step in the right direction. The PRTs are such a focal point at Masdar because this is a region where petrol is nearly as cheap as water and so many people drive guzzling SUVs. Granted a few PRTs aren't going to change attitudes overnight but awareness is being raised and issues are being raised so I take my proverbial hat off.
Masdar City has highlighted a lot of problems to the local community and I'm really impressed by it so far. I also love the automatic PRTs! So nippy and fast!
11 May 2011 6:39AM
I should add that in London I walked everywhere And never used a car so travelling at 25 mph seems pretty quick to me. Clearly I have been deprived of experiencing high speed vehicles! :)
11 May 2011 6:53AM
I wish this would stop being described as 'zero carbon'. That implies no carbon has gone into making it - which is far from the case. I haven't been there but I imagine thousands of trucks rolling in and out daily, huge amounts of concrete being used and acres of glass. All of these things have massive embodied energy.
What's more, the construction of solar panels takes a large amount of energy and the very fact that the whole place is 'high tech' means that there is a huge invisible support industry for all the components - most of which will probably be in China.
I'm all for sustainability, but I think we have to be more honest in describing these places otherwise they truly will be mirages.
I'd be willing to bet that the kind of town that would have been built in that region 150 years ago would be 1000 times less energy intensive. Progress?
11 May 2011 7:05AM
Hmm, conventional wisdom here, down the other end of the SZR in Dubai, is that Masdar was a big publicity stunt generated in all the pre-bust euphoria and that now the AD rulers (well MbZ who is the one that counts) have lost interest hence the massive and abrupt defunding of Madar last year (compare the "vision" to the modest accomplishment). They secured the HQ of IRENA (in return for toadying up to the US as revealed by Wikileaks cables) and thus got the requisite green veneer on the basically unsustainable Gulf urban model. I mean what is the point of a "zero Carbon city" (oh, and I believe that zero carbon motto is being junked too - going to something like the equivalent of Body Shop nonsensical "against animal testing") which could only be built using the resources of the most environmentally unfriendly state imaginable?
Masdar is yesterday's story. MbZ and co are too busy arresting pro-democracy bloggers, continually seeking new ways to subtly humiliate Dubai's MbR (not unjustifiably of course) and organising spontaneous tribal shows of loyalty to pretend to care about the environment any more..
11 May 2011 7:12AM
Architecture review without pictures is like porn without sex.
11 May 2011 8:47AM
NoneTooClever
11 May 2011 6:53AM
They tried to take all of that into account, including by using recycled and low-carbon building materials, and by offsetting. Here's an article discussing it:http://www.aggregateresearch.com/articles/14562/The-new-Masdar-City-first-in-its-kind-for-ZERO-emissions-waste-and-carbon.aspx
More on the undercroft. The undercroft idea was vastly more expensive than putting the vehicles on overhead guideways. It also made the city layout less flexible. If overhead guideways had been used, there wouldn't be the problem of accommodating the personal rapid transit system alongside human-driven cars at the same grade, so if the PRT had been overhead, the budget cuts probably wouldn't have affected the podcars. Letting human-driven cars into the city represents a massive dilution of the original vision.
11 May 2011 9:30AM
@one life I don't think it's yesterday's news at all. The place was teaming with life at the market event and in Abu Dhabi there's a concerted effort to advertise it. It's often advertised or referred to in Abu Dhabi week which practically every expat here reads.
Besides the abrupt defunding had little to do with MBZ losinginterest and more to do with the fact that the project was losing stacks of money due to being badly managed from the start. I say this because the Mr works for the same finance company which has been brought in to fix their money issues and get it back on track.
Masdar might not be the utopia that it's been made out to be but it's not worth writing off yet. The science university means that it will all be on the map for a long time even if interest in the city's green credentials slides as the years go by
11 May 2011 10:30AM
It looks like the set of Total Recall from the pictue, Johnny Cabs everywhere!
11 May 2011 10:35AM
The way I had it explained to me, the problem with the pods was that the system couldn't cope with the complexity. There were going to be hundreds of different potential starting and finishing points for journeys and it just wasn't possible, I was told, to get the system to organise that efficiently. It sounded surprising - I'd have thought modern computer systems could handle such a thing. But I was told that was the reason for their abandonment.
Unlike the author, I found the pods quite fast, even if it was a little pointless for the very short journey between the car park and Masdar institute.
As I understood it, there are not going to be undercrofts in future phases. They'll be on ground level. I don't know quite what the policy on cars there is going to be. There certainly isn't an expectation that many will be allowed into the main city. The streets are wide enough for fire engines and so on, so there must be some scope for powered vehicles to use them.
The city is designed to encourage cycling at street level, although I didn't see any when I was there. I certainly wouldn't want to cycle in the undercroft with the driverless cars. They'd make London white vans seem safe.
11 May 2011 10:40AM
On the point about the conventional wisdom in Dubai, incidentally, I find it hilarious how in the Gulf everyone slags off the next city along. In Oman, they shake their heads, suck their teeth and say how the last thing they want is for Muscat to become like Dubai. In Dubai, they accuse Abu Dhabi of just spraying money around indiscriminately (although anyone who's visited the spectacular Yas Hotel might say Abu Dhabi has done it with real style). Masdar is Abu Dhabi's quiet rebuke to the chaos of Dubai. And everyone is shaking their heads over the Qataris and their bizarre plans for high speed railways, air-conditioned world cup stadia and so on.
They can all end up sounding rather provincial.
11 May 2011 10:58AM
And in the Independent last week I read that the "zero-carbon" ambitions have been slashed, a former honcho from Shell is now in charge of the project, and much of the electricity will come from gas-burning power-stations.
Just another Emirates real estate gimmick.
11 May 2011 11:50AM
Being eco-friendly is not enough to make a city sustainable.
Sustainability has lots of dimensions - economic, social, cultural, educational - which must all work together, in addition to the built environment. It won't be sustainable if it ends up being a class-riven dictatorship, even if it is low carbon.
11 May 2011 12:02PM
I do hope a journalist comes back next month when the temperature gets up to 50C and tells us how pleasant it is to walk around the shady, water-cooled streets. Of course, it could still be better than the broad, unshaded, traffic-clogged roads of Abu Dhabi City, which are generally not much fun to walk along at any time of the year.
11 May 2011 1:34PM
Longhaultrucker
11 May 2011 10:35AM
There's no evidence that it can't cope with complexity. In fact, it's designed to operate in complex networks, and a simple loop with two stations doesn't show off its advantages to the full. Perhaps when the person giving you that explanation said "complexity", they meant interacting with non-PRT traffic. PRT depends on having an exclusive right-of-way to function efficiently, but someone decided in early 2010 that human-driven cars (electric, hybrid or CNG) should be allowed into the city, and it was obvious that they would not be able to share ROW with the PRT system, so the PRT system lost.
11 May 2011 8:43PM
@swedinburgh Masdar is still very much being presented as a carbon neutral city and that's still the aim. At least it was a week ago! Everyone involved in the project says that hasn't changed...but they have realised that they have quite a few issues to deal with,
Besides if a former shell 'honch ' has been brought in it's not to fill the place with petrol but to tidy up a rather large financial mess (Masdar was bleeding money until recently)
12 May 2011 10:33AM
Dear All
thanks for interesting comments
I wrote this to keep up to date with the The Market@MasdarCity, an event that encouraged a good number of local people to come and see Masdar for themselves. I'm sure we'll return to Masdar in some detail as it progresses.
Mr gruniadreader666: this is a blog, not a feature article. I think we're all still experimenting with how we work online. There's a feeling - still - that we shouldn't write at length online. I would be interested to know what readers (or are we "viewers" online?) think.
all best wishes
jg
12 May 2011 6:50PM
As for me, I haven't even red that blog-entry. I am not interested in architecture, and the more I don't care about a city that name I cannot pronounce.
Since you have finished your A-levels just recently, it's time now to get used to all these new media. Someone told me once, that it needs much research to attain knowledge. Not a bad suggestion, isn't it?
Look there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Guardian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture
But in the end, I think you should simply come back to important things, which really touch our lives.