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[Strawbale] re: Embodied Energy, Carbon research of Big Bales...
On Sun, 04 Nov 2007 13:14:03 -0500, Max Vittrup Jensen <max@permalot...>
wrote:
It so happen to be that Canadian François Gonthier-Gignac and I are in
process of developing a tool to promote cleaner ways of building through
optimizing Embodied energy, energy efficiency and costs in residential
housing.
Some time ago (10 years ?) through the auspices of Canada Mortgage &
Housing Corp.
http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca
there was a LCA software program developed called "OPTIMIZE" that enabled
one to model the embodied energy of a proposed design, as well as the life
cycle costs and other things like replacement costs at the end of the life
cycle, water consumption, waste generation, ease of re-use/recycling of
the deconstructed building materials and if I recall correctly, potential
for off-gassing of VOCs and actual dollar costs.
I've gone through a number of hard drives since then so I can't pull up
the actual printout results (about 10 pages per run I think) at the moment
but if you contact CMHC, they should be able to provide you with
documentation.
put to the task of coming up with an amount of kilo joule whichgoes
into 1 single big bale, my approach would be to find out how many big
balesan average (European) baling machine make per hectare, and find out
the liters ofdiesel consumed. These figures should give the individual
answer.The LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) tool then also need some figures
for transport to storageand to site,
Typically, the figure for embodied energy would include the energy
consumed for transport to storage and to the site, as well as the
"production energy" for harvesting and baling operations and any other
energy consumed during the process of construction to get the bales in
place in the walls. You will this defined in:
Cole, Raymond J. and Rousseau, David. 1992.
Environmental auditing for building construction: energy and air pollution
indices for building materials. Building and Environment 27, #1 (January)
Obviously, since big bales require the use of heavy machinery at each and
every stage of their handling, the embodied energy per kilogram of straw
will be greater than that for "regular"-sized two and three string bales
so the figures provided for the EE of straw in the references provided
earlier in this thread, will not apply.
Also, I'm pretty sure that the EE numbers in the sources mentioned were
compilied by looking at Canadian and Australian
farming/transportation/building practises which I suspect, would be
noticeably different than those for most European locations, mostly due to
scale.
Even here in Canada, one will see quite a difference in scale between 2
different provinces within the same country (ie Prairies vs Central
provinces.)
--
=== * ===
Rob Tom
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c at chaffY a h o o dot c a >
manually winnow the chaff from my edress in your reply