Carbon Cycling in The Regenerative Built Environment
Rammed earth planter beds. Rammed earth is a natural building technique that involves mixing local soil and aggregate with a small amount of cement and rammed into forms.
Carbon naturally cycles through our environment in all kinds of ways: From the carbon in the carbohydrates we eat that our bodies metabolize into energy, to the wood-chip mulch on garden beds that gets metabolized by soil organisms. Carbon in wood chips breaks down complex carbohydrates and feeds into more carbon-based cellulose, which comprises plant tissue.
Carbon contains a lot of energy and nature, generally, is a system for keeping that energy tied up in cycles. Animals eat carbon rich plant material to gain energy. Then release excess carbon through there digestion which plants and soil biology then takes in to make accessible to plants to give to plants to build more carbon rich plant tissue.
And for the most part humans have been able to stay in cycle with this balance. Even if we burned plant material, we still had to allow for enough new plant material to pull that carbon back out of the atmosphere to find more carbon-based plant material to burn. But modern society runs into a problem with carbon. We have created a society developed around combusting materials rich in carbon—mostly hydrocarbons know as fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuels breaks molecules apart, carbon atoms form double covalent bonds produced between 1 carbon atom and 2 oxygen atom and carbon dioxide molecules are born.
Because we have been extracting and burning reserves of these ancient hydrocarbons from earth faster than the environment can cycle them back into living tissue, or feed active creatures, we have an imbalance. Too much carbon dioxide stored in the atmosphere ("greenhouse gas”) traps excessive heat leading to earth getting warmer.
An illustration of carbon cycling through the environment
A lot of carbon dioxide is produced in construction and the daily use of buildings. Operational carbon is the amount to carbonized released into the atmosphere from a building’s utilities—heating, cooling, lighting, etc. Carefully orienting buildings with to respect to solar orientations, incorporating well-insulated building material, electric equipment packages, going solar, and making considered plantings choices through the build environment are all design strategies that can reduce operational carbon.
Additionally, a lot of carbon dioxide is released through the production and transportation of the materials used to construct our built environment—so called, “embodied carbon.” Steel, aluminum, plastics and cement are a few of the worst offenders, not to mention all the transportation and waste that goes into our current building models.
The molecule of cellulose. The carbon rich material that makes up a majority of plant material/ tissue
Recycling, repurposing, and reducing constructions wastes, along with and utilizing locally sources are great ways to reduce the embodied carbon that goes into a built space. Other strategies include using materials that pull carbon from the atmosphere and puts it into buildings.
Some possibilities for sequestering carbon in the built environment include: Replacing steel beams with heavy timber made from FSC (Forest Stewardship Council ) certified wood; Building with natural building materials such a hemp-crete, strawbale and cobb, and plant-based building materials such as wood, hemp, cotton, straw, and cork, that are grown and harvested responsibly, is non-extractive and works within nature’s carbon cycling system.
This pizza oven is build out of Cob. A natural building martial that uses local soil, sand and straw- an easily renee carbon rich material
Buy sustainably growing and harvesting plant-based building materials we are allowing for carbon to be pulled out of the atmosphere and embedded into out buildings. In that way we are developing our built environment with carbon cycles that closer match preindustrial carbon cycles.