Materials
The materials common to many types of natural building are clay and sand. When mixed with water and, usually, straw or another fiber, the mixture may form cob or adobe (clay blocks). Other materials commonly used in natural building are: earth (as rammed earth or earth bag), wood (cordwood or timber frame/post-and-beam), straw, rice-hulls, bamboo and rock. A wide variety of reused or recycled materials are common in natural building, including urbanite (salvaged chunks of used concrete), tires, tire bales, discarded bottles and other recycled glass.
Several other materials are increasingly avoided by many practitioners of this building approach, due to their major negative environmental or health impacts. These include unsustainably harvested wood, toxic wood-preservatives, portland cement-based mixes, paints and other coatings that off-gas volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and some plastics, particularly polyvinyl chloride (PVC or "vinyl") and those containing harmful plasticizers or hormone-mimicking formulations.
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Famous quotes containing the word materials:
“The competent leader of men cares little for the niceties of other peoples’ characters: he cares much—everything—for the exterior uses to which they may be put.... These are men to be moved. How should he move them? He supplies the power; others simply the materials on which that power operates.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Kicking his mother until she let go of his soul
Has given his a healthy appetite: clearly, her role
In the New Order must be
To supply and deliver his raw materials free;”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)