Home / Sustainability

Sustainable is usually a label. Here it is a mechanism.

Four things have to be true for a building material to deserve the word. This is how each one works.

The idea in one picture

A loop that was already turning. We joined it.

The dung existed either way. The only thing we added was a buyer.

Four mechanisms

What each claim actually rests on.

The carbon is never created

Cement's emissions come from calcining limestone at 1,450°C. Our limestone goes in raw. There is no kiln, so there is nothing to capture and nothing to offset later.

The main input is already waste

Dung is produced daily whether anyone buys it or not, and is otherwise composted or burned as fuel. Putting it in a wall locks that carbon into the building instead of sending it up a chimney.

It keeps saving after it is built

Embodied carbon is paid once; cooling is paid every month for fifty years. An insulating wall cuts that load for the whole life of the building, and it is much the larger number.

It is socially sustainable too

Dung is bought from village gaushalas on a standing order at an agreed rate, not collected free. A gaushala with revenue is not one bad year from closing.

There is deliberately no single kilograms-of-CO₂-saved figure on this site. A defensible number needs a completed life-cycle assessment, and ours is not finished. When it is, it goes up with the methodology attached.

The bigger number

Most of a building's carbon is spent after it is finished.

60–70%

of all energy generated worldwide is consumed by buildings.

Most

of that goes into heating and cooling the air inside — a load an insulating wall directly reduces.

The gauge on the home page shows the shape of that effect, and the conductivity figures behind it are on the problem with cement page.

Sustainable Development Goals

Three goals we can point to a mechanism for.

3 Good health
and well-being

Fewer chemicals on the interior surface, and a room that holds a survivable temperature through a heatwave.

9 Industry, innovation
and infrastructure

A low-energy process substituting for one of the most energy-intensive industrial products in the world.

11 Sustainable cities
and communities

Housing that is cheaper to finish and cheaper to keep cool — which matters most where air conditioning is not an option.

Uplifting gaon with the help of gau.

Not a slogan bolted onto a construction product. It is the reason the product is made from this material and not some other one.

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