Sustainable Home Guidelines

 

Materials

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Introduction (Size 13K)
Choosing a building material involves a number of sustainability issues.

Building materials (Size 38K)
It can be difficult to assess exactly how sustainable a product is and which materials are preferable to others. Often we have to rely on manufacturers’ information, which can be biased and incomplete.

Assessment sheet for 'Eco' building materials (Size 16K)
Sometimes it can be difficult to determine exactly how ‘eco’ a product is and which materials are preferable to others. Often we have to rely on the manufacturer’s information, which can be biased or incomplete.

Timber (Size 91K)
Timber is the primary building material in New Zealand. It is relatively cheap, the building code makes designing with timber easy, and builders know timber frame structures are “Core business” for New Zealand builders.

Plastics (Size 45K)
Because plastics are durable, inexpensive and lightweight, they have become a popular building material. They are the standard for most piping and electrical cabling; heavily used for vinyl flooring, furniture and furnishings and are even competing in areas like external cladding and window joinery. 

Paint (Size 58K)
Many surfaces in the average home are painted - furniture, walls, ceilings, wooden floors, exterior cladding, roofs. Paints have been used for centuries to make surfaces more attractive, easier to maintain, or to protect them from the elements. Paints and finishes can extend the lifetime of some materials, such as weatherboards, dramatically.

Earth building (Size 305K)
Earth is an ancient building material that is still used in many different ways with about half the world’s population still living in earth buildings.