You may have heard the saying “If it’s not grown, it’s mined.” It’s as true for construction materials as it is for anything. The challenge for architects as climate crisis accelerates is to shift the materials palette away from inputs that are extracted from the earth and toward the ones that regenerate.
While the supply of extracted material is finite, biogenic material is inherently—and in some cases rapidly—renewable. Because extracted substances require significant amounts of energy to get them out of the ground and turn them into such familiar forms as steel, concrete, and rigid-foam insulation, biogenic substances typically entail lower levels of energy to make into building products. What’s more, the atmospheric carbon that plant-derived materials such as wood, cork, hemp, and straw sequester during their growth can even exceed the carbon emissions their processing generates, making them net carbon sinks.
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