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:
“Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Our job is now clear. All Americans must be prepared to make, on a 24 hour schedule, every war weapon possible and the war factory line will use men and materials which will bring, the war effort to every man, woman, and child in America. All one hundred thirty million of us will be needed to answer the sunrise stealth of the Sabbath Day Assassins.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“He was no specialist except in the relation of things.... He took most of his materials at second hand.... But no matter who mined the gold, the image and superscription are his.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)