Designs for Sustainable Living

It is not enough in this time we live in to only provide a resource efficient, cost efficient, and energy efficient building material for the walls of a building. The ideal we are striving for with Pumice-Crete® DSL is to incorporate this usefully masonry wall system into a building design that greatly increases the sustainability of the completed building. Combining efficient masonry buildings with more sustainable energy systems such as solar electric, passive solar design, energy storage, recycling, maximum efficiency water systems, water catchment methods, and non toxic construction methods and materials. To this end we are emphasizing the DSL effort to offer buildings “designed for sustainability”.

These designs utilize renewable energy, self sufficient, earthen, and de centralized approaches to the design and construction of homes and businesses. These designs can be, or may not be, appropriate to your locality. Local conditions and markets determine how a building should be designed and what materials should be used.
In association with other professionals engaged in the sustainable building movement we are able to offer completed buildings and partially constructed shells for many construction budgets that will:

1. Require minimal purchased energy inputs to maintain and live comfortably in.
2. Facilitate a relationship to the natural systems our earth provides.
3. Harvest water and energy from the site they are built upon.
4. Recycle and efficiently process the outputs of the building to reduce pollutants into the environment.

None of these elements of a building that help its occupants conduct their affairs in a more sustainable manner require advanced scientific design or complicated expensive technology. It’s not rocket science, more correctly it is common sense and motivation to be a part of the solution to pressing contemporary issues that lead us to incorporate these appropriate building methods and technologies.
Initial construction costs can be higher for these innovations but this should not deter builders because increasingly the payoff times on the initial cost are becoming shorter and the returns on the investment in sustainability are immediate.

--SCOTT MACHARDY, OWNER
PO Box 539, EL Prado, New Mexico 87529
  machardy@newmex.com