I have a love hate relationship with the local Brooklyn green building supply stores. I love that they sell green stuff, I hate that they want to sell as much of it as they can.
Most people would scratch their head at that comment. “Of course they want you to buy it, what wrong with that.”
I have no issue with Home Depot trying to sell. They are old school, part of the old way of stupid building.
Get Green Product
But when Green Depot or Bettencourt approach me with the same enthusiasm to sell it is bitter sweet. Great, lets get more green products into the world. Not great we’re still pushing the consumer society model.
If you are buying green or buying not green you are still buying. Green for me is about buying less. Period.
Here is a conversation I had with one green building store:
Me:
I’m really interested in finding local clay. It seems crazy to pay all this money and waste all this energy to ship earth half way across the country (referring to American Clay, aka AC, in New Mexico). Any ideas?
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Them:
I’m sure you could find it but it would be really expensive I’m sure, and nobody around here knows how to blend it. ACs formula is unique – it took them 350 tries at least to get the blend down. now its patented. AC features “the lowest embodied energy of any engineered wall finish on the market” (i can send you empirical data if you’d like) – by a lot!! and our role as distributor is to truck volume here at a time so as not to ship it direct from NM everytime. So it has only been in transit once.
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Me:
“RE: you simply can’t find a more eficient wall finish on the market.”
Yes but how hard are you looking? 🙂
350 tests…..engineered…..empirical data……
Sir this is an ancient process. The cave men did it. The Romans did it.
Take clay, put on wall. Any skilled builder can continue the age old
building technique.
And a patent? What are they doing, following in the footsteps of
Monsanto (who is claiming ownership over seeds)?
I’m going to do my best to prove you wrong and find local clay. I
don’t care how great AC is, local clay is greener.
But until I find it I’m happy to use AC and buy it from you 🙂
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