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Why Buy Local Building Materials?
When we think about strategies to reduce the carbon footprint of our homes, most of us think about ways to reduce our overall electricity demand. This focus leads us to work on updating to more energy-efficient appliances, improved insulation, or switching to LED bulbs. Whereas even the smallest energy-efficient upgrades can increase the operational efficiency of a home, there is another source of emissions that we rarely take into account.
Embodied energy refers to the total amount of energy used during the process of building a home. This energy comes from mining and processing natural raw materials, milling and manufacturing these materials into functional building products, and transporting and product delivery to the building site. In many cases, the embodied energy emissions of a home might contribute more carbon emissions than the actual "use" of that home, known as the operational emissions.
The World Green Building Council found that 11 percent of global carbon emissions are associated with the embodied carbon from buildings' materials and construction processes. The typical home weighs between 200 and 350 pounds per square foot. A two-story, 2,500 square foot home, then, could weigh around 625,000 pounds. Consider the amount of energy required to physically move those materials from their source to where they were manufactured before finally being sent to the building site.
Let's follow the potential path of tropical hardwood, for example. It might have been cut down from the rainforests of Brazil, then transported by truck to a port city for milling. After that, it was shipped to Europe, where it was manufactured into panels and then air-freighted to the US, where it eventually ended up on the shelves of your local Home Depot. A more sustainable option for a homeowner in the Midwest might be to purchase hardwood flooring from a local Amish woodworker. That woodworker purchased his lumber from a neighbor and milled at the local mill down the street.
An article published in Northwestern University's research center finds that the transportation of building materials to the house site contributes between 6 and 8 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions for a building project. A similar study in Brazil found that number to be upwards of 10 percent. In the United States, the embodied energy "cost" of transporting building materials by road amounts to 2.13 Mega joules/ton/km. Products shipped by air or cargo ship will undoubtedly come with a much higher embodied energy footprint.
If you don't have a friend who works in the local construction business, consider searching for reusable construction materials, such as NextDoor, Craigslist, or other Facebook groups. Contacting local building contractors and companies is also an easy way to alert people to your interest in gathering salvaged building materials. Habitat for Humanity's ReStore is another excellent resource that sells many salvaged and refurbished home improvement items at a fraction of retail price.
Companies like the Reuse Network also work with individual homeowners and construction companies to help them develop a waste diversion goal to qualify for LEED certification or comply with state and local government waste diversion mandates. If this company works in your area, you might be able to find a good source of reusable construction materials.
Online Resources for Finding Local Building Materials
You may know a farmer, forester, stone quarry worker, or others who can source raw materials from your region. With that said, the internet is also a valuable tool to discover local workers and local building materials in your area.
Woodfinder.com is one helpful website that allows you to search for sources of lumber, veneer, wood specialties, and sawmill services by merely inputting your zip code. Sometimes, a simple Google search doesn't bring up other local businesses that provide raw materials for home renovation projects. You might consider searching for job listing sites. For example, Indeed.com allows you to search for "stone quarry jobs" by city, state, or region. Even if employed outside the stone quarry industry, you should find nearby companies to connect with to find local materials.
Though the Classified Ads pages of local newspapers have seen better days, online classified services are abundant. Websites like Craigslist, Oodle, Backpage, and Locanto are just a few of the classified sites on the internet where you can easily search for a wide range of local building materials.
Building Materials
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What Are Commonly Found Local Building Supplies in North America?
Finding local building materials might be relatively straightforward for some renovation projects. For more extensive remodels or new builds, however, local sourcing can be more difficult. This website offers a fairly comprehensive list of building materials made and manufactured in the United States. Unfortunately, not all companies showcased on this list can reliably claim to have sourced the raw materials for their products from North American sources. If you are having a hard time determining whether a particular building product is locally/nationally produced, the following tips can be helpful:
- Cheap plastics are almost always foreign in origin and probably made in China or some other Asian company.
- Engineered stone products are made from crushed stone bound together by some polymer. There are at least 100 engineered stone suppliers in China alone. This means that there is a good chance any engineered stone products you purchase will be from overseas and have a high embodied energy footprint.
- Cheaper plywood is also often manufactured overseas, usually from lumber scraps from North American mills. You can find a list of United States plywood manufacturers.
It might seem ironic that building materials manufactured on the other side of the world are cheaper than products made down the street. Such are the incoherencies of our global economy. In general, however, the higher upfront cost of local building materials will pay for itself over a lifetime of use through the resilience and durability of the refined craftsmanship.
Tobias Roberts
Tobias runs an agroecology farm and a natural building collective in the mountains of El Salvador. He specializes in earthen construction methods and uses permaculture design methods to integrate structures into the sustainability of the landscape.
