 50 years from now, how will we be building homes, workshops, factories, shops, and offices? Just think of how the modern construction industry would have to change without access to fossil fuels. Concrete would be less available. Distant, exotic materials would be too expensive. Even metal would become tough to get. Without motive power, we're stuck with the resources we have nearby. Or is there another way to think about the problem? This is the Lotech Podcast. Hello and welcome, I'm Scott Johnson from the Lotech Institute, your host for podcast number 64 on January 27th, 2023, coming to you from the Lotech recording booth. Thanks for joining us. Today, I am introducing our 10 mile building challenge and some of what we have coming up in the spring, summer and fall. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter, our handle is at low underscore techno. Like us on Facebook, find us on Instagram, subscribe to us on YouTube and check out our website lowtechinstitute.org. 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If you've ever been around a building project, you know that there are a lot of resources sunk into every new building created. Large transport trucks bring all kinds of materials from across the world to your building site. Factories produce shingles, siding, flooring, and every other imaginable material for your home, office, shop, workshop, etc. Excavators dig basements and foundation footings with ease. Cranes lift large trusses on roof structures. Engineers materials create big open spaces unimaginable to our ancestors. Cori's turn out huge amounts of cement and concrete for us to use in ever-increasing ways. But none of this is possible without the huge amount of energy available to us from fossil fuels. The large machines run on diesel, creating cement requires huge amounts of energetic input. Our transportation network is dependent on fossil fuels. While factories might be able to run on electricity, they wouldn't have access to the raw materials they need to produce anything without fossil fuels. One way to quantify how much fossil fuels are embedded in construction is to look at carbon emissions. Unfortunately, it's really hard to nail down exactly how much carbon is emitted to construct, say, a house. Part of the problems is that let's say we use an excavator to dig a basement for a house. In addition to the diesel used, how much of the embodied carbon emissions to create the machine itself should be counted towards the basement carbon footprint. If an excavator works for say 10 years and it only takes a couple of days to dig the basement, does it just get a fraction of the embodied energy of that machine? So that's beyond what we're going to talk about today. The materials council did the math on some typical construction materials, comparing how much of each material you get for emitting one ton of carbon, which is a rough gauge of how much fossil fuel is used in their production. You get the least of things like aluminum, requiring an entire ton of carbon just to get 0.2 cubic meters of the metal. Steel is even worse returning 0.04 cubic meters per ton of carbon emitted. And then if we move into glass, we start getting a bit more material per ton of carbon. Glass comes in at 0.44 cubic meters per ton, which is similar to granite at about half a cubic meter per ton. Synthetic things like vinyl and linoleum and rubber very widely from rubber at quarter cubic meter per ton to linoleums almost 0.69 cubic meters per ton. When compared to these materials, concrete seems actually pretty efficient at 3.2 cubic meters per ton of carbon emissions. But so much concrete is used from foundations, floors, driveways, buildings, walls, and other uses that it still accounts for a huge amount of energy use. When we move on to more natural materials, the carbon footprint goes way down. Even an engineered product like plywood returns as much as 3.58 cubic meters of material per ton of emissions. Wood itself, though, is by far one of the best materials you can possibly use. It gets as much as 9.8 cubic meters of softwood per ton of emissions, which is more than 27 times more of volume than concrete or plywood. Similarly, clay gets nearly 10 cubic meters per ton of carbon emitted. These natural materials are so much more efficient, and for many of us out there in the country, so much more readily available. In a future with less access to fossil fuels, these are the obvious choices for building the future. Obviously, these materials were used heavily in the past also, but one of the main differences is that we have much better engineering understanding and material science to know how to create stronger, safer, and more efficient structures with the same amount of material. Our tagline here at the Low Technology Institute has been housing, clothing, and feeding ourselves without fossil fuels, or in a fossil fuel-free future, but that's really hard to say as I just demonstrated. So one of the big projects we've been thinking about and working on over the winter has been how would you build a structure using local materials, and how do you quantify something like that? To look at this problem as a challenge has brought to us to create something we're calling the 10 mile building challenge. We can look at the lack of access to resources in a less energy-intensive future in a negative way. We can complain about not having access to Italian marble countertops or other exotic but beautiful materials. We can bemoan the fact that we can't just rely on concrete and steel anymore because they're no longer available, and we'll be surrounded by a legacy of both good and bad structures. Some houses and buildings were made to last, even when we use new and innovative materials that may or may not meet the test of time, but we also have a lot of bad designs that require huge amounts of energy to heat and cool the structures instead of having created designs that are naturally protected from extreme weather. And as we move forward in the future creating new structures with a different world in mind, we may need to figure out ways to retrofit and rebuild structures that only work today in a high-energy world. But it's going to be hard to look at some of our more recent buildings and not feel like we've lost something with the end of fossil fuel availability. In some ways that will be true, but in others we have a huge opportunity to really change the way we build. The Low Technology Institute has created a building challenge that pushes designers, architects, and builders to consider local resources when constructing a home, office, or workshop. If you aren't architect but are restricted to use materials that come from near the building site, that will radically change how you build. The Low Technology Institute is announcing a building design challenge that simulates this future and we call it the Ten Mile Building Challenge. The goal of this challenge is to push builders to consider what it will be like putting up a structure in a future when fossil fuels are no longer available. While today it may be better to use natural materials imported from outside the city to build a sustainable long-lasting house, in the future this may not be an easy option and this challenge will drive builders to reconsider reclaimed recycled or novel materials close to where they are, be that rural, suburban, or urban. The goal is to develop strategies and solutions to meet the higher engineering standards of strength, durability, and efficiency of today with traditional, natural, or novel materials available nearby. In the country in suburbs, natural materials are easier to come by. Trees can be milled into timbers and boards. Earth can be dug and rammed into forms to make walls or stacked into earth bags. Clay can be smoothed over walls and polished for a lustrous finish. In the cities, recycled materials may be the clear choice. Bricks, lumber, insulation, windows, and wire can be salvaged from defunct buildings. Okay so what is the Ten Mile Building? It's basically a building constructed materials that come from an average of 10 miles or less from the building site. That's it. This symbol metric cuts out unsustainable building practices and materials and is equally applicable in any region here and we're going to lay out the basic challenge concept which is a certification process which is free or you can even pay for an outside audit. But we'll go over additional utility certifications which also exist in another episode. Here we're going to have an example right on the Institute grounds and we're going to discuss more about that now. So you might be thinking that you've heard about other building, sustainable building certifications and wonder why we need something else. The best known of these programs is called LEED which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design but there's a lot more of them out there and almost creating an alphabet soup including Bream, Caspi, NGBS, Living Buildings, Energy Star and a lot more. What all of these do is measure the environmental impact or the sustainability of a building project or its operation. Most of them have a point system and the better designed the higher the points and the level of accreditation. For example out of a total possible score of 100 a LEED platinum building received over 80 points in their scoring rubric. The problem with scales like this although we do think their goals are laudable is that they're not understandable to an average person. I've been asking people over the last few months what is a LEED building just to see what they would say and most people come back with some sort of fuzzy statement about environmentally friendly construction methods. Unfortunately this vague understanding permeates much of what is considered to be quote-unquote green today. Furthermore people who are building with real alternative sustainable methods and materials ignore these certifications because they are considered to be mainstream greenwashing but most importantly for us in a future without fossil fuels we will have to drastically change how we construct buildings. Even what's considered today to be the cutting edge of sustainable alternative design may not be possible without our fossil fuel driven transportation network. The 10 mile building challenge challenges is an artificial restriction to simulate some of the challenges designers and builders will be facing in a quarter century or half century. Plus when I said that most of the materials for this building come from less than 10 miles away every visitor will immediately understand what that means. So why use distance as a measure of sustainability? Why not use carbon footprint? Well for one carbon footprint is really difficult to measure in a concrete way and there's no pun intended there. Like I mentioned before how much of the embodied carbon of an excavator should be attributed to digging a basement. Do you get to count the tires as they get replaced faster than the excavator right? There's just so many questions it opens a can of worms that's not really feasible for a typical builder or designer to calculate. Distance on the other hand is really easy to measure and so is weight and the chances are the more sustainable something is to make the more likely you are to find it locally. Complex chemicals must be created and combined and this is done in centralized locations far away. Concrete, steel, aluminum and synthetic chemical compounds are all made at factories and they rely on transportation network to distribute them far away. Also the more complicated a building product is such as plywood, drywall and synthetics the more likely they're also made at one distant location and then shipped all over the world. None of this is feasible without fossil fuels. On the other hand renewable materials like wood, straw, reusable things like stone and brick have been produced locally for centuries. They'll be available after fossil fuels are no longer around because they were available before fossil fuels were here. But sawing lumber for example can be done anywhere. Clay found across the globe so so is straw and stone. Additionally limiting builders and designers to use local materials will help architecture fit within its own landscape. Part of the cachet of Italian marble countertops is that they come from far away. This is called conspicuous consumption which basically means spending money to show off. This challenge is the opposite of that. What beautiful structure can you build with what you have on hand? We already lived this challenge to some extent. We live in a house that was built in 1855. The bricks were dug from a clay pit just to block away. The wood was cut in a sawmill on the creek that runs through town. The doors and windows were made a block away in the now gone hoxy, sash and door factory which use a horse gin to drive the machinery. The fact that durable and beautiful houses could be built locally less than two centuries ago should tell us that this is completely feasible. Or more than that since we have greater engineering and materials knowledge meaning we could rise to this challenge to create even better structures. Let's talk a little about how this will work. The point is to be easy to understand and the calculation is very simple. We thought about it different ways to measure distance and materials but the in the pre fossil fuel world the primary consideration of transport was weight and so long distance shipping was what we came down on. So what we do here is multiply the weight of any building material by the distance traveled to get to the building site. Then all the weights for all the materials are summed and the total pound miles are divided by the total pounds to give us the average total miles. This is really clear with an example. Let's take a simple one. Say I want to build a dog house here in Wisconsin. I get 50 pounds of wood milled locally let's say four miles away and I put the dog house together with a pound of nails from Ohio which is 300 miles away. So if I multiply 50 pounds of wood by four miles I get 200 pound miles. I multiply the pound of nails by 300 miles and I get 300 miles. That gives me a total of 500 pound miles. That's how much the building contains and I divide that by the total weight of the structure which is 51 pounds giving me 9.8 miles. My dog house then it would be considered a 10 mile building. If you're from outside the U.S. you could use 15 kilometers as your cut off but really this is an arbitrary distance. It's about what would be comfortable for a horse and wagon to go and pick up something in a day. Some 10 mile buildings might actually be six or seven miles when the math is done. Others might be in the teens but this gives us a real understandable way to compare how locally and sustainably a construction project was sourced. We also have a rubric to talk about utilities. I'm going to spend more time on this later in a future episode but basically it looks at what percentage of the structure's utilities as measured by estimated emissions are provided for within the 10 mile radius. So for example a wood stove fired by local sustainably harvested firewood would be seen as a better over its lifetime than say a natural gas furnace which is dependent on distant natural gas resources. If you want to read ahead or see more about this challenge you can go to lowtechinstitute.org slash TMBC that's just 10 mile building challenge abbreviated to its initials lowtechinstitute.org slash TMBC. So now let's turn to what you can expect to hear about in the next year. We are going to use this rubric to audit a building we are creating on our own grounds. Over the last few months we have been designing a timber frame structure that will house a workshop and living we plan to use as many local building materials as possible and still meet code. This is a huge challenge with many moving parts and over the next year we hope to have interviews with different designers builders and professionals to discuss various aspects of how to design and build a 10 mile building. The podcast will essentially be deep dives into various aspects of design and construction but there are other ways to follow along with the project. We'll be documenting the entire thing on YouTube so if you're not already subscribed to our YouTube channel head over there and subscribe to make sure you don't miss out. We hope to put out a weekly or bi-weekly video showing how each component of the construction project is being done and moving along over time. We'll discuss and show the challenges successes and failures as we face them. If you're in the southern Wisconsin area you can actually take part in any or all of this building project as well. In March we're going to start with classes on felling trees, refurbishing antique tools, and building a toolbox. In April we'll be building mallets and saw horses and learning about milling timbers. We'll also be working on the stone foundation for the building. By the end of April and into May we'll be cutting timber frame joints and beginning to assemble the first floor and then the superstructure of the building at the end of May. By June we hope to be working on the roof followed by the flooring and siding. By July we should be using light straw clay to infill the walls for insulation as well as talking about how to build windows and doors, install flooring and siding. By August we'll be working with professionals to install utilities including electric plumbing and heating and by September we hope to be working on the interior finishing like lime plaster walls and a masonry heater. These classes can be taken a la carte or a person can take all the classes for a flat fee. We also hope to have some free public days for folks to come by and see how the project is going. The first part of any construction project is the design process and that's what we're going through right now and we will detail in an upcoming episode. We want to tread the line between giving you interesting information but not going into too much detail that it's overkill. If you have questions you want answered about the project feel free to write into Scott at lowtechinstitute.org and stay tuned for more. That's it for this week the low tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute. The show is hosted and co-produced by me Scott Johnson co-producing edited by Hina Suzuki. This episode was recorded in the low tech recording room subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube and elsewhere. We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. If you'd like to join the community and help support this work we do please consider going to patreon.com slash lowtechinstitute and signing up. Thank you for to our Forrester and Land Steward level members, Sam Brown, Marilyn Skirpon and the Hambuses for their support. The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members, grants and underwriting. You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute, membership and underwriting at lowtechinstitute.org. Find us on social media and reach me directly. I'm Scott at lowtechinstitute.org. Our intro music today was Skyscrapers off the Albums City Slacker by Holista. That song is in the public domain and this podcast is under the creative comments, attribution and share like license. Any are free to use and share it as long as it is creative. Thanks and take care.