[Music] they want to build differently with natural materials and in a climate friendly way basically back to straw and Clay but a modern version but will it work it all feels very experimental which can be a bit nerve-wracking we will be following hogga folk and his wife Carolyn over the course of a year as they build their straw house in these circles building modern from scratch is not an option their goal is to reuse materials and keep them in circulation the wall is destroyed as long as the majority of the building stays like this it's
fine I'm annoyed with my son's methods not with him personally but definitely with his methods a sea change is called for alongside Transportation the building sector is the worst contributor to climate change presenting a real challenge for scientists and experts who until recently didn't take alternative construction seriously we used to laugh at people working with clay and straw thinking it had nothing to do with real construction work involving concrete or brick work all of it non-recyclable stuff that was our training but I'm not laughing about straw and Clay anymore on the contrary [Music] it's December
2021 Caro and hulga ful have left their old lives in nurburg behind headed for burgenland in Austria close to the Hungarian border near the city Gratz is where they want to realize their longtime dream of building a straw [Music] house it's a place that attra stressed out viones and Germans alike looking to leave it all behind for a small piece of heaven where there's plenty of space and affordable [Music] land we'll plant little trees over there it's finally ours we've been entered into the land registry here we're practically standing in what will be our house
built from bales of straw the walls that is wooden roof construction that was the tricky part how to support the roof I'm just a lay person I'm happy to have a St in the design of my own house but most importantly it has to hold they've both completed several straw building workshops and now they want to build both a round guest house and a main house doing much of the work themselves the start of construction and their biggest challenge lies only 2 months away if they get all the permits that is their Temporary Home nearby
also serves as storage for used windows and doors which they collect to reuse for the sake of the climate their savings will cover the costs of their guest house but how they'll proceed after that is unclear Carl is taking a break from her job as a photographer while hogga continues to work as an IT specialist yeah they've designed a lot of the building themselves with consultation from a straw bail expert and an architect the moment of truth is approaching the couple will present their plans to the mayor of the municipality they don't want to be
connected to the sewage system in their home country Germany that would be impossible hello hello good afternoon hello welcome to our community h it's a mega project it's gotten bigger but nothing astronomical would you like to talk us through it car we'll have Clay walls inside and plaster them ourselves in my childhood home we had a small wine seller that we made with clay and straw that's an experience that I'll never forget and what we've come up with in terms of Wastewater technology it's a circulation system this is for our gray water a plant-based purification
system and for our black water our well sewage we use compost toilets so it's basically a closed system that will be a first around here this is the frante from 2021 a sparkling wine not bad [Music] to the round straw baale house the round straw baale [Music] house it feels a bit like and now you may kiss the [Laughter] bride we were a bit nervous to begin with but when the mayor made it clear that he shares our vision it felt like a dream I almost felt like crying beautiful they are blissfully ignorant about the
real obstacles that are yet to come just a two hours drive to the south in Slovenia the topic of sustainable construction has another person fired up as in Germany the housing shortage and climate crisis have to be tackled simultaneously in the post Yugoslavian Balkan country but with less resources many old houses are in need of renovation and they're being replaced by cheap new buildings Andre fedek believes that this will only make matters worse he's an activist against the throwaway culture and has founded an association to fight against it in his opinion the many dilapidated family
homes in Slovenia should be part of the solution there's like this crazy statistic that there's 70,000 houses where only one person lives on 200 square m so the this idea of co- housing to renovate these old houses and to get two houses out of one house the anti-waste activist wants to set a good example right where he grew up that's where the last Farm in jalet is located he has bought it and wants to renovate it in the mean time he wants to live in a popup house from NASA an old shed is also part
of his Construction project all the materials used are to be recycled as far as possible in order to save resources in Slovenia building houses is a family affair and together with his father ravan Andre creates a material log book for all the materials found so that they can be treated as recyclable materials rather than waste in the future even the popup house from NASA which will accommodate him during his Balon vacation as the construction period is also known here is to be reused afterwards so there are different types of zero waste this construction is uh
assembled to be disassembled later if required so it's a pop up Dome well first thing we have to understand is that we live in time of climate change so basically if you want to retain our standard of life we have to change absolutely everything all the underlying systems and this is um a project which will try to reach this uh this go initially he didn't plan to leave the Old Farm standing his idea was to replace it with a wooden house that could be easily dismantled to save waste further out buildings would to be created
from the demolition material which would also be free for the taking for everyone in the neighborhood he even received the bow house prize of the European Union for the design with the prospect of getting funding basically we just wanted to like deconstruct the old house and from the available materials buil the tools library and the greenhouse that would be attached to the new zero house it would be designed to be disassembled in like a 100 years time or something but things turned out differently he had overlooked a small print clause in the sales contract regarding
the construction of a road on his property he thought it would be the end for his prise and then obviously everything fell into the the water because of this one small road that was here for 25 years when dreams are shattered down you need a little bit of time to to recollect yourself but then I started thinking I mean I'm trying to create a zero house and without realizing that a zero wte house already stands so I was like it's the it's the classical you know the first step of zero waste is you try to
keep it like uh in use for as long as possible so he decided to try renovation instead of demolition he was allowed to keep the prize but faced new challenges on the ground floor 60 cm thick walls are a good insulation but in the never inhabited attic the wind blows right through the cracks is the substance of the Beam still good enough I mean it doesn't look much now but I see there's like some hidden potential in here although uh it's going to be a lot for and will he be able to afford the extensive
renovation with the loan he has already taken [Music] out the first thing is to get these roof tiles off and once everything is cleared then we can really inspect the entire structure if it still has Integrity this is my biggest concern that if you're going to have to renovate the entire roof it's going to cost so much that it would be better to to just demolish the whole house Andre decides to have the old building materials thoroughly inspected while clinging to his vision of keeping the building materials in circulation as long as possible just like
the rainwater which he wants to collect and treat The Gardens of the Old Farm should also be open to everyone in the village like neighbor FICA gradek is it all [Music] the pensioner still remembers the place from the days of Yugoslavia when everyone used to meet here Andre wants to revive this Spirit but what does FICA think of Andre's [Music] plans I'm for all things ecological organic and low waste that's all my generation knew anyway without having those labels we didn't have so many material either and everything in the garden was done without pesticides and
chemicals it was all organic vanica appreciates Andre's commitment to the common good he is taking a considerable personal risk with his renovation project if just 20% of the old beams are Beyond saving the roof structure would have to be completely replaced that would be Beyond his means but his enthusiasm is under diminished and if you go through the zero hierarchy you see that the best thing to do is to retain the current materials in the shape that they are there's nothing wrong with old houses why not update and give it a new life for the
new era Andre's original idea has failed but that failure actually helped him to move forward in the end it made him realize that renovating is the more sustainable form of [Music] construction it's a realization that is finding growing support in the academic Community as part of a Student Competition supervised by architecture Professor Anette hillbrand a former lace Factory near vetal is to be renovated she sees the approximately 21 million buildings in Germany housing 28 billion tons of materials as a gigantic storehouse huge amounts of energy were consumed in the production process alone so why not
use this so-called gray [Music] energy wires covered in clay I think the building material is good all of this is loadbearing brick work quite thick and then you have these great ceilings here partially with hanging wires to support a suspended ceiling I would leave this free because it looks nice on closer inspection the building's inventory is like a treasure waiting to be Unearthed and with the construction sector falling woefully short of its climate targets one way to avoid emissions would be to keep built resources in circulation together with other experts Anette hillbrand has campaigned for
a demolition moratorium denouncing the climate damaging practice of demolition visit the only reason we're still able to sit in this old building is because it's been listed otherwise it would probably have been demolished long ago this moratorium on demolition is a way of saying that we need to prioritize the existing buildings we've been demolishing far too early and it's become clear that even the best new highly insulated building still emits more CO2 than a poorly renovated existing building and if you know that then you can't really be in favor of new construction it's now miday
and back in banland construction of the guest house has begun Caro and hogga have been able to recruit one of Austria's straw building experts Herbert Gruber an international crew is about to begin with the ultimate challenge of their trade loadbearing straw bale construction but since a house like this isn't exactly pre-fabricated permits are only given on a Case by casee basis here the building holding blocks are compressed straw bales holes are plugged walls are adapted and trimmed they will later be the only support for a roof weighing several [Music] tons every single baale of straw
has a life of its own because they're all compressed differently every straw has grown differently we've all become straw Bill Whisperers saying oh if you don't like this let's try in the other direction and so on there are around 700 straw houses in Austria almost 1,000 in Germany and about 10,000 in France the biggest advantage of the material is its unrivaled environmental friendliness it binds greenhouse gases as it grows and consumes little energy during production thanks to the air that is pressed out a bail of straw is not excessively flammable especially if it's later plastered
with Clay several times before the covid pandemic a straw House cost 3% more than an ordinary house there has since been a price hike in industrial building materials but there's another Factor the entire construction process depends on those who provide the building materials and you can't patent a bail of straw from the field and turn it into big business this is from an organic farmer who produces It On Demand all year round it's available we have all the tests but I can't make big money with it this type of construction also depends a lot on
manual labor does it like [Music] that with the wall construction behind them the most exciting part awaits will the 7 ton roof be [Music] stable it feels very experimental which is a bit nerve-wracking I'm very confident now now the crane has to balance the roof exactly it has to load the walls evenly without even the slightest gust of wind in the end the roof which was custom made by a 22-year-old carpenter fits well nearly anyway the rods are touching the sill so we have to do some cosmetic trimming [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] super the last
addition is the I which will allow future guests to gaze into the Starry Sky later everything is sealed with straw wood and a plastic film without which The Green Roof might not be completely watertight the carpenter is happy too that was the moment I've been waiting for all week for the roof to finally sit on top where you can look at it from below and suddenly see this ingenious geometric shape unfold in all its Glory it's crazy so far so good with the guest house while there is an Ever growing awareness of the many advantages
of building in straw there are still structural obstacles to [Music] consider renewable and sustainable raw materials currently are at a disadvantage because Decades of advertising have led us to believe that the new products are somehow better and that the old ones might go moldy or something we just don't have a Lobby behind us to push this forward what we have are small manufacturers who produce these building materials with renewable materials and of course they need to be [Music] supported back in galetes 3 months months have passed since we first met Andre fesk and now he
knows for sure that he'll be able to renovate the old house the historic beams were good enough and he'll raise the roof and install a cube at the back he's also been helped by the fact that Renovations have recently been made easier by only demanding one building inspector he gave me his advice what to do and afterwards it's done he's going to go and check and if it's if it's all checks out then he going to put a signature on the paper and that's it so you don't need a construction permit but you need an
expert opinion that the house is not of lower quality than before in Germany architectural associations are now calling for similar rules but there are other things bothering Andre apart from his building site like his other zerow waste projects the container for cooking oil was his idea I can't believe I they did we doing this project voluntarily for free trying to put something better into the community but now it's full of plastic it's ridiculous his father's logistics company also demands Andre's attention he's responsible for planning transports to Germany and someday he will run the company but
he can't get the building site out of his mind because there things are about to really kick off the simplest part will be moving into the temporary house things will get trickier when the workers open the roof will the structure be able to withstand three new windows and a wooden cube with a dash of irony Andre likes to describe himself as a Critic of the system that he's benefiting from basically I'm a contradiction on two legs and this can be seen here as well like on one hand I try to have very socio eological uh
project you know having Commons embedded into this property on on the on the other hand this wouldn't be possible if I wouldn't have a job in good old capitalism you know the next minor crisis comes in the shape of a wall Andre's father ravan can hardly bear to look the wall is destroyed it's wonder I'm not surprised it's all falling apart anyway okay oh it could be worse I suppose as long as the majority of the building stays like this it's fine I'm annoyed with my son's methods not with him personally but definitely with his
methods and his use of old materials sometimes we don't quite see eye to eye on that it's complicated without being much of an improvement with a worm eaten Cross Beam this wall is beyond saving the work also reveals 1970s poyene unsure of what to do with it it's a bitter blow for Andre fortunately he's found an experienced company despite the high demand for skilled workers in Slovenia I'm slightly tired from all the thinking basically of what to do how to proceed what to do with all the waste this is the biggest issue I think we
try to avoid a lot of waste but some things you just can't and then by but it's okay the boys they have a system but there's some hope at the top of the roof the beams will hold the old tiles are removed before reinforcing the beams and since Andre wants to convert the heating to geothermal anyway the old chimney can go now there's space for 40 cm of natural insulation now we raise the beams for additional 12 CM uh we we got more space and we uh reinforced the entire structure as well and on top
of that we placed Uh Wood fiber boards and the idea is to not have an air conditioning unit here so and for vertical WS we're going to reuse this uh this wood to create like a like a construction underneath so it can be placed on top but a project like this remains a major undertaking hard an option for the average house [Music] owner big cities like Munich are under a lot of pressure to create more living space while protecting the climate here the magic word is red dentification older buildings must either be able to support
new additions or get demolished here too the focuses increasingly on the building materials last year alone the municipal housing cooperative WG built more than 1,000 apartments at the same time it had to renovate entire neighborhoods like here in rasdorf where apartment buildings from the 1950s are next in line the idea is to do things better if demolition is the only remaining option building components are to be checked and cataloged beforehand it's called Urban mining the idea is to treat each house as a kind of raw material mine it's checked for reusable or at least recyclable
materials it's vital that those materials are easy to separate and for this they have an external materials expert it's only logical that the wood has been treated the question is just which coating has been used it's been painted over several times in the past 40 or 50 years so if you're building from scratch it makes sense to look at which substances to use or to avoid a material check has has to justify the demolition of a building or at least compensate for it somewhat in terms of energy but not everything is recyclable no need to
think too long on this stuff it's full of nails it's been treated and then you have these plaster based boards hanging from it best to burn it and enjoy the warmth when we're evaluating whether a building can be modernized wooden beam ceilings are usually seen as a killer in a life cycle of 50 or 100 years we can assume that we'll soon have structural stability issues because of the wooden beams and the cost of replacing them is disproportionate still the disposal of 74 million tons of construction waste per year in Germany is a growing concern
and with time being of the essence it's important to take stock of what can and must be recycled in the future before [Music] demolition they're not the nicest but I would recycle them together with the windows this used to be standard practice postwar buildings were erected when people had to think about what they could reuse from the rubble to build something new we don't have a choice today either in the current context of scarcity and resources now it works you can just remove it whole I'm sure somebody will want to use a sliding door like
that in the long term we also have to ask ourselves where we can build a new landfill or where there's a need for a new raw material plant or which Forest to cut down next to get raw materials and this is where Urban mining comes in it's the approach to use what we already have there are architects who are prepared to build like this but it's the experience and skills that are lacking and they have to be built up first for me this issue will take care of itself we're already experiencing insane bottlenecks and Supply
construction prices have skyrocketed to such an extent that some projects are already being halted we have to change our mindset together with the regulations guidelines and building laws in order to have the chance to use recyclable or reusable materials again to in their work has resulted in a building component catalog of sorts with information about materials and emission savings it will be used internally at gwg and perhaps also for projects in the neighborhood but that requires good networking something that's still lacking and will become increasingly important in the future you can use it again for
a new construction so it's actually in pretty good condition topnotch you won't get anything better if you buy it in a store we'll take it as a display sample in the future a so-called building resource passport mandatory at least for new buildings could help but the fate of the buildings in this residential area has been decided demolition awaits making way for taller and wider wooden buildings most people don't know that 90% of all raw materials that we extract here in Germany regardless of whether they are natural say forest or gravel or something like that that
90% of them flow into the construction industry they don't know about the quantities of waste or about the 40% carbon footprint that is created as a result I actually think it's important that more people look into this because it's threatening their own habitat we seal 200 square km per year and if you think it through which is usually a good idea then you can imagine all of Germany being covered in concrete is sponer Caro and holga and banland are deliberately Building without any concrete and without a basement 3 months after The Guest House was built
a lot has happened the straw walls have been plastered Corrections have been made and peace has returned but all of it and the organization for the green roof has has taken a lot of effort they can't keep the original time frame and have decided to postpone the construction of the main house until next [Music] year we just didn't have a good feeling about it we both agreed that it would have been too stressful and exhausting for us sometimes of course you have to put pressure on yourself for example the roof has to be sealed before
the fall so we have no time to [Music] lose one tinsmith stood them up others were too expensive now they have to build their own anti-slip protection for the green roof they now also know that the base of the house should be watertight as well as the roof they had to repair the plaster around the front door and the cupboards designed by Caro are to be attached to the top of the wooden beams since mounting them directly on the straw wall would jeopardize the structure for the time being Hog's office is in the future kitchen
area and at some point a wood burning stove and a bathroom will be [Music] installed there will be the wet room with three pipes for electricity water and waste waterer then under the window where you have good ventilation will be the toilet but actually a compost toilet shouldn't smell as bad as a regular toilet so we'll see here later they want to produce their own electricity and heat using photovoltaics and solar thermal energy hga has a newfound passion permaculture the philosophy of working in Cycles in the garden too it helps him to recharge his batteries
for the final push on the roof construction end of October in charlettes a lot has happened at Andre's place too the roof has been Tire the new Cube has been built and new windows have been fitted the hemp creek company should have started insulating 2 weeks ago but unexpectedly more layers of dirt had to be removed from the attic Andre also had a milestone birthday to celebrate their friends organize a surprise birthday party and this is what happens they brought this big poster inovan it means which is like a vernacular way of say of how
much material we already wasted as a society and this is something that kind of like got stuck in the heads of my friends and they're like making fun out of me but in a good way I know because it's something that is very true after all materials obssessive Andre was finally able to win over one of the few Slovenian companies working with natural insulation with hempcrete to be exact the composite material consists only of chalk hemp and water water the mixture is then sprayed into compartments on the walls and in the floor where it hardens
the environmental balance is very good thanks to minimal energy requirements maybe that's why the industry is attracting new workers my main profession what I'm trained for is kindergarten nature okay uh but I thought that it's better for me if I work in natural building uh and I really like what we are doing what we are doing for our customers and what we are doing for environment the hemp insulation also ensures an excellent indoor climate unlike poyene the walls can breathe the hemp comes from Hungary but it used to be grown in Slovenia too back in
the days of Yugoslavia Yugoslavia used to grow uh the biggest amount of hemp in the world per square meter but then it kind of like uh stopped you know once we gain independence and so on and the hemp has a bad rep due to like various other reasons in Germany for example you can already have like a sort of an industry coming out of hemp but here everything is at the beginning so I think it's the future of construction apart from insulation hemp creete is a good acoustic insulator Andre still has his moments of doubt
he wanted to build a zero waste house but that won't quite happen instead it's a synthesis of old and modern building techniques with lots of ecological materials he estimates the total costs at €200,000 much less than for a new building does it mean that his zero waste idea failed the idea is alive it's in like constant motion and now we are reaching this stage where we are slowly finishing everything and I just hope to show that it's like a good example of how things could be done differently I mean there was waste but then on
the other hand there could be so much more waste because a lot of the stuff we left in the original state and uh the idea I know it transforms over the time so it's uh an interesting [Music] challenge we need to think in terms of Cycles in the overall system we need to see ourselves much more as part of the natural cycle again we buy so much useless stuff and it's the same with building we have so many useless building materials and they only end up causing problems all future Generations will have to pay for
these problems just as we're paying for asbestos now the next generation will pay for hbcd and the one after that for pasas it has to stop that was also the line of thought in the town of corbach when planning a new town hall it's built from Demolition material from a lowrise building from the 1970s it was developed by Ana Rosen an expert in circular construction the facades and walls are made from old concrete and bricks that were sorted and recycled nearby it's called R concrete R for recycling this means that the building produces 7% less
emission than conventional Concrete in terms of urban planning it also fits in better with the historic town hall [Music] of concrete recycling has actually been around for more than 20 years it's just hardly ever done perhaps the need has finally Arisen with building materials becoming scarce we realize that we need to change our Behavior so we're trying to recover resources from an old existing building for a new one concrete is considered a climate killer the production of the cement is both energy and Emissions intensive less cement saves valuable resources I'm looking for these brick chippings
in the facade which make Urban mining visible here Urban mining sees the city as a raw material Depot and this was the first urban mining project in Germany building for the future also means thinking about future disposal already at the planning stage or even making it unnecessary the easier it is to separate materials the better in terms of workmanship this means that plugging and screwing replaces is gluing and bonding like here on the roof for example for later dismantling which will hopefully only happen in a distant future in a 100 or 200 years or more
we've ensured that the materials can then be separated by type again and so for example this zinc sheet can be harvested by Future generations and used to make new products architecture Professor Ana Rosen has also developed a digital tool that quantifies and combines the ions materials and recyclability of building components the urban mining index it helps planners to better assess the climate impact of materials as well as their recyclability plenty of daylight natural materials warm wood and then pure concrete architecture influences the environment and architecture is crucial to ensuring that buildings last a long time
that they are multifunctional and people love them and the people of quak really do love their Town Hall which contributes immensely to sustainability because it will last nevertheless environmentally conscious building is still often considered a luxury and far too expensive a reassessment of the true costs of a building is needed not only the investment into a construction project should be considered the environmental impact of the costs of materials must also to be made visible from production to Demolition and Disposal Urban the good thing about the urban mining index is that you can now actually measure
circularity people often claim that sustainable construction is more expensive but I think non-sustainable construction is more expensive overall with the urban mining index we now have an instrument to measure circularity and convince people with simple figures to make this possible Ana Rosen conducted 5 years of field research she looked at walls materials and heating systems and calculated how much energy greenhouse gases and recycling potential they contain the result is a kind of recycling encyclopedia with concrete costs we made calculations where we compared conventional constructions with recyclable constructions when we created the recycling encyclopedia we had
the help of a demolition contractor to calculate the actual costs in terms of dismantling in disposal afterwards we did this for three projects and for all three projects it turned out that the recycling friendly or closed loop projects were the more economical in the long term but who has that kind of long-term thinking what is needed is a policy that standardizes such instruments and promotes them in a targeted way in burgenland disaster has struck the rain won't let up and a professional should have arrived yesterday to help with the installation of the plastic film for
the green roof but it's refreshing the professional didn't show up now hogga and Caro have to do it themselves again already exhausted after watching countless tutorials in the night the seems just have to be dry we'll just have to go out tomorrow morning at Sunrise and see what the weather's like nothing to do but wait and hope look at that big patch maybe it clears up we're right [Music] there a few hours later the weather clears and landscaper Leo lends a hand he wants to learn about round roofs after all green roofs counteract many of
the effects of climate change by storing water from heavy rainfall for example Carol looks after the little plants with her father they are grown in ADV Dan and will be put on the roof [Music] later you sort of grow with a garden with the tasks and that's fulfilling uh yeah sometimes you need things that maybe aren't completely sustainable but instead of beating yourself up about every mistake you have to focus on how to improve in our case we need to seal our green roof in some way it's our living space after all so yes everyone
can focus on improving themselves and that's my message for everyone out there in the world [Music]
