Sustainable Builders Yak

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you put hemp into a structural brick? Will Stewart, director and co-owner of Natural Brick, joins us to unpack how his team is rethinking one of the most familiar building products around, from what goes into the mix to how it performs once it hits the wall. Natural Brick’s current brick uses hemp grown in NSW, making up around 45–50% of the mix by volume. Rather than being kiln-fired, the bricks are naturally cured using solar heat over an eight-week proces...

Send us Fan Mail Most climate conversations in sport start with the elite game. Tom Campbell starts with the clubrooms: a grassroots footy club whose power bill dropped from $9,000 a year to $900, with the $8,000 difference going straight back into the club. Brian and Simon are joined by Tom Campbell, co-founder of Footy for Climate, which he started while playing at North Melbourne, in the season the Black Summer bushfires filled the training track with smoke. Its Power Forward program puts ...

Send us Fan Mail Australia is the seventh most forested country on earth, yet it imports around $5 billion more timber than it sells, and the gap grows every year. Matt de Jongh, a forester of about 25 years and now with Responsible Wood, the body behind timber certification in Australia and New Zealand, explains how that happened. His blunt version: at home, we have run out of wood. Most of the conversation digs into what "sustainably managed" actually means on the ground. Matt breaks down t...

Send us Fan Mail Australia's National Construction Code climate zones and NatHERS and PHPP models built on them, are calculated from climate averages that are no longer holding. When Brian raises this, Monash University climate scientist Ailie Gallant stops and admits it's a gap: she hadn't considered the building code angle, and says she'll take it back to her team to look into. The bulk of the episode is a plain-language climate science primer, delivered without jargon by someone who does ...

Send us Fan Mail Andy Marlow's definition of efficiency in passive house and airtightness will annoy some people: it's doing the bare minimum required to clear the hurdle, which he says is much the same as being really bloody lazy. Andy is a director at Envirotecture, a long-time passive house advocate and former Australian Passive House Association board member — and he thinks the industry's obsession with beating its own numbers is costing builders money for no measurable gain. The core of ...