5 Green Building Materials

Wool Bricks

Invented by Spanish and Scottish material researchers with the goal of creating new age green / eco friendly composite that cost effectively enhance the strength of conventional bricks.

These special bricks, 37% stronger are formulated by adding wool and a natural polymer found in seaweed to its base ingredient, which is clay.  They are especially suitable in Malaysia due to high resistance to hot and wet climates.

Solar Tiles

This one has been obvious all along. Roof tiles is often one of the materials that is exposed to most direct sunlight. Now we are witnessing a global shift towards harnessing this massive, free and renewable energy as more solar farms built, and solar panels being installed on modern buildings and homes.

Next would be transition from solar panels to solar tiles and perhaps even solar paint! Fully integrated into a structures’ electrical generation system, solar tiles aims to maximise the energy gain from our sun and by serving its basic purpose, as roofing material, it definitely yields much better “energy absorption” surface.

Sustainable Concrete

This building material has been responsible for 7-10% of global CO2 emissions. These amounts are staggering as concrete is one of the most basic foundation materials required for the construction of virtually any building.

Efforts to make sustainable concrete, started by using recycled materials in a standard concrete “mix”.  These includes crushed glass, wood chips, slag, byproducts of other material manufacturing process, and even paper, which is well known as “papercretes”.

Paper Insulation

Paper based insulation, made from recycled newspaper and cardboard is the eco-friendly alternative to chemical foams. These materials are both insect and fire resistant due to its natural ingredients like borax, boric acid and calcium carbonate.

Common application of paper insulation is blowing it into cavity walls, filling all the cracks within, resulting in an almost draft-free space.

Triple Glazed Windows

In simple terms, these 3 layered glass windows does the best in stopping heat from leaving a building (assuming usage in cold countries). In between layers of these glasses, krypton, an efficient insulator is injected to achieve such effect. To augment this further, low-emmisivity coating is applied to the glass.

With more material innovation and inventions sprouting everyday, we hope to soon witness modern cityscapes built fully using green, eco-friendly materials and construction methods, that are also self sustainable, drawing renewable energy from nature itself. This would ensure a bright future for humankind as a whole!