One of the cool things we’re doing over at TEDxAsheville is pulling together a great lineup of non-speaker interactions. One of those will be an outside table manned by the Nauhaus (pronounced “now house”) folks, who are building Asheville’s first and only officially recognized Passive House (and the first ever Passive House built with hemcrete, a hemp-limestone building material).
Coming with the Nauhaus crew will be their partners, Dave Madera and Greg Flavell of Hemp Technologies, LLC, an Asheville-based company that is providing and installing the hemcrete for the build.
From the Nauhaus site:
Through a combination of passive solar design, a super-insulated building envelope, interior thermal mass, high performance windows and doors, and careful construction detailing, Nauhaus buildings are designed to be up to 90% more energy efficient than present code mandates, creating a healthy, comfortable indoor environment without need for a furnace or air conditioning. This substantial decrease in energy use allows renewable energy systems to be downsized. The consequent reduction in price brings self-sufficient power production and even carbon neutrality within reach. This “state of the art” building science is combined with site-harvested materials, rainwater harvesting, greywater irrigation, extensive outdoor living spaces, a lush edible landscape, small scale animal husbandry, and wildlife habitat to make sustainable homesteads a possibility even in densely populated urban neighborhoods.
Hemcrete has some amazing properties, the most fascinating of which is the fact that it’s actually a carbon negative building material. That’s right, even accounting for the resources used to ship the hemp from the UK (it’s still illegal to grow in the US), hemcrete takes more carbon out of the atmosphere than it’s production and application put in. How? By the magic of it’s other major ingredient, lime. During it’s multi-year curing process, lime absorbs carbon dioxide in the air to become limestone. And it does so while purifying. moisture balancing and freshening the air inside the building. Incredible.
From the HemTecUSA site:
Hemp is the miracle plant of our time, breathing in 4x the carbon dioxide (CO2) of trees during it’s quick 12-14 week growing cycle. Trees take 20 years to mature vs 4 months for Industrial Hemp! Our forests are being cut down 3x faster than they can grow! One acre of hemp produces as much cellulose fiber pulp as 4.1 acres of trees!!! (Dewey & Merrill. Bulletin #404. U.S. Dept. of Age. 1916)
Learn more about the Nauhaus being built in Asheville
HemTecUsa/Hemcrete
Passive House Video (two parts)
Hemp-lime building video
Soni Pitts, a TEDxAsheville Organizer
This event is not being organized by the TED conferences — this is an independently organized TED event.
