Sustainable Building Monthly!

Sustainable Building Week networking is too much fun to keep it once a year. We’ll supply the drinks, light snacks, and a few topics of discussion.

Biochar in the Built Environment?

Terry Campbell, of Sustainable Northwest Wood, recently returned to Oregon from a two-week Biochar Academy held by the International Biochar Initiative (IBI).

Come learn about how the creation of biochar could simultaneously help forestland restoration, clean up our waste streams, and promote a circular economy, all the while displacing some negative ingredients/elements in our building materials and the built environment. Oh and it also sequesters carbon too 🙂

From Project Drawdown: Biochar is a carbon-rich, highly stable soil amendment produced as a by-product of pyrolysis, which generates energy from biomass in the absence of oxygen. When biomass decomposes, carbon and methane escape into the atmosphere. Biochar retains most of the carbon. If we bury it, mix into long lasting building materials, or simply apply it on the site that the biomass was generated that carbon can be held for centuries.

Recently, biochar has been mixed into concrete to create a lower GWP product but there is endless potential for making building materials from biochar.

Come down and have some fun!

All sustainability friends are invited whether you’re in design, construction, academia, government, business, manufacturing, or something else. All are welcome because it will take all of us to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Masks are not required in the well-ventilated, often open air “decony”.