Students helping to build strawbale greenhouse
A month ago, the only thing behind the garage at the northwest end of Logan High School was a patch of grass. By next June, it’ll be home to Logan High School’s first greenhouse, and the first strawbale building in Logan.
Jack Greene teaches Logan High students about man’s footprint on the earth and spearheaded the greenhouse project for two reasons.
The greenhouse will be a great teaching tool when it’s finished, he said, and he’s excited about that. But one of the most exciting things about this building is the construction itself.
Every Saturday since March 24, the building has come closer to completion at the hands of a group of volunteers. Part construction professionals, part ambitious student volunteers from Utah State University, the group is united by an interest in building homes to a self-imposed code of earth-friendliness.
A strawbale structure is exactly what it sounds like – a structure made of bales of straw.
It’s an age-old concept, said Wayne Bingham, the architect who designed the greenhouse. Farmers have to do something with the stuff leftover when hay is harvested. Covered in plaster, bales of cow-feed can be turned into something like giant bricks. Stack enough of them on top of each other, they make a really warm, thick-walled building.
It’s the kind of idea professionals in construction are embracing as an alternative to the mining of the earth’s natural resources the industry has accepted as the best way to mass-produce housing.
“The industry is set up to mass-produce,” Bingham said. “It’s kind of all set up with different companies producing different parts.”
He points to the blue insulation that’s been attached to the north-facing wall of the greenhouse – the heat sink wall – so warmth absorbed during the day will be released into the room instead of leaking outside. The insulation is absolutely necessary, but, “To produce this board, they have to pump lots of oil and it comes to us with a tremendous use of natural resources.”
The blue insulation is a sore thumb among the rest of the building materials.
Sandbags, hay, lime plaster, wood planks – almost everything else in the building comes from the earth without much, if any, energy-intensive processing. And the group putting it all together is learning that a house doesn’t have to come through a developer and contractors – it’s absolutely possible, with enough willing hands, to collect these materials and create a house independently, Bingham said.
“There was no homelessness before the industrial revolution,” Bingham said. “Because people just built their own houses. We say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve got to buy a house like all the other people have, and that means I’ve got to get a job, and my wife’s got to get a job, and my kids have got to get jobs, and we have to get a loan and pay mortgage for 30 years.’
“That’s just not true.”
Stan Petersen, a professional mason from Tremonton, joined the group because he’s working with Bingham to design a strawbale house for himself. He’s taking energy-efficiency seriously – solar panels will take him off the city’s electricity grid. When he’s finished, the 1,000-square-foot structure will have cost him, he estimates, $30 per square foot – compared to an average of $75 per square foot for a home from a developer.
After more than 30 years as a professional mason, he knows what it takes to build a liveable structure, he said.
“Just because something works on the space shuttle doesn’t mean that we have to have it on our homes,” he said.
“These are bar none the most sensible things we can do for the environment,” he said, gesturing to the all-natural materials. “They’ll never convince me that we have to use high tech tools and materials.”
Since the industrial revolution, growing technology has brought so many conveniences, people have forgotten how to balance energy-inefficient convenience with work-intensive human labor, Bingham said.
“I think we’ve had a separation from the realities of the results of our choices that has lulled us into not seeing the big picture,” he said.
For instance, when a person flips on the light, they’re not thinking about the power that has to travel from some plant in Central Utah to make that little bulb glow, he said. People don’t think about where the materials that went into making their house came from or how much energy it took to produce.
Students can make a difference now, said Kenton Peters of KP2 Architects, a Salt Lake construction company that specializes in building environmentally friendly and safe homes. Peters was the last speaker in a series of lectures sponsored by the Bear River Institute in connection with the building of the greenhouse.
“Students are pretty lackadaisical about wasting energy,” Peters said.
Turning anything off that doesn’t need to be on – lights in the daytime, the TV when nobody’s watching it, the computer when nobody’s on it, the radio when nobody’s listening – would make a significant impact. Students can also use natural ventilation instead of the furnace and air conditioning.
“Maybe 68 degrees isn’t too cold in the winter,” he said. “Maybe 75 or 76 isn’t too hot in the summer.”
It’s all about making a personal decision to be active in your housing environment, he said. It’s not necessary to give up a way of life, but it may be necessary to spend a little effort to maintain it.
“We can still have cold beer in the fridge,” Bingham said. “We don’t have to give up every nice thing in life. But there has to be a balance.”