Fifteen-year-old girl creates building material from waste

India's Bisman Deu develops an environmentally
building material from farm's biggest waste product.

After seeing the environmental hazards that burning rice waste was causing at her family farm in North India, then-15 year old Bisman Deu saw an opportunity to create something useful, and developed an environmentally sustainable building material out of the farm’s biggest waste product.

She’s 18 now, and finishing school in Chandigarh, but Deu is on a journey with her product, Green Wood, as it becomes more relevant now than ever before.

To understand Deu’s product, one needs to understand the levels of dire pollution that the entire North India region suffers as a result of two major burning seasons for farmers. The first round is in May, during the heat of summer when wheat chaff is burnt and rice crops are sown, and the second in November when rice paddy is burnt and wheat crops are sown.

Deu’s family farm in the North Indian city of Amritsar grows both wheat and rice.

Read the Forbes Asia story “At The Age of 15 She Invented Building Material From Indian Rice Waste.”

Melbourne's 'Library at the Dock' is sustainable forerunner of bigger things

M

elbourne’s “Library at the Dock” is built primarily from timber.

Melbourne's 'Library at the Dock'.

The impressive three storey building serves the Docklands community as is an example of what can be to create and interesting and innovative building in a carbon constrained world.

The library was designed and built with the community in mind and through its construction also answers broader societal needs in that it is the outcome of a more sustainable building process.

Building processes used in “Library at the Dock” employing laminated timbers, it has been argued, are adequate for a 10 storey building and now in British Columbia they have just built a 17-storey “skyscraper” using timber as the primary construction material.

Read the Treehugger story - “World's tallest timber tower to be built in British Columbia”.