Asheville, NC–The Nauhaus Institute (NHI) is scheduled to begin the installation of its revolutionary hemcrete walls on its prototype research home this Wednesday December 2nd. Because a small part of the wall system was installed as a demonstration on November 12th, the prototype home is already the first of its kind in the US. The material, called Tradical® Hemcrete®, is made from waste hemp shiv and a lime-based binder. Designers from NHI have opted to pursue Passive House certification which would make the house not only one of the fist ten certified in the US but also the first Passive House hemp home in the world.
“This is going to be a really significant project on a global scale,” said Ian Pritchett, the Chairman and Technical Director of Lime Technologies who manufactures Hemcrete®. Pritchett flew in from the United Kingdom to mark the event. (see the full interview here – Youtube).
Designers of the home say that the new material will not only create breathable, long-lasting walls but also give the home an insulation performance of three times what building code requires. The material can be mixed and poured in to forms in a similar fashion to concrete.
“We’re essentially building with a bio-composite made from agricultural waste and a recyclable binder,” said Tim Callahan, Architectural Designer for NHI. “The lime binder itself has been used as a building material for thousands of years.”
The construction project has already raised eyebrows nationally in the green building world. “It’s going to be off the scale for LEED points,” said Pritchett. “This is a very big deal.” LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” and is the dominant rating system for environmentally sustainable construction. And it doesn’t stop there; the NHI team is projecting that the house will break records in nearly every quantifiable sustainability standard by which homes are measured.
“We sought out this home because it’s had a reputation as a historic project,” said Matt Schillig, owner of WNC ProBuilt. Schillig is installing the Hemcrete®, framing and Eco-Panels roofing on the prototype home.
The Nauhaus Institute is the research, education, and information-generating branch of the Nauhaus family of organizations based in Asheville, NC. The goal of NHI is to merge the best of modern high tech building science with the core principles of the “natural” and “green” building movements.
