Grow your own house? Or happy hippy building blocks?

As promised I checked out Ecobuild last week - definate improvement on last year where sheep's wool was being promoted as the next best thing for insulation - although I did get to thinking about this one - if all the 13 million homes that were currently under-insulated moved to sheep's wool then firstly would we have the volume of sheep's wool to cope with this demand? Would it be a good promotion of sustainability to then use up even more land for grazing more sheep on? Would we even have sufficient room for all that many sheep - or would we have to import it from abroad...?

I was reminded of these thoughts as my eyes met the latest development on the sustainable building products being launched at Ecobuild - "Hemcrete" - yes, you've guessed it using hemp mixed with lime and binders to produced a combination of hemp and concrete for spraying onto walls. Now this might sound like a wind up but this is a serious product behind which a number of large organisations stand behind... As I researched into this I came across information this idea is not exactly new...whatever next...

On my travels last week one of the discussions I got caught up in was on the issue of carbon off-setting... (what an exciting life I lead, I know... ) what caught my attention was that the traditional offer of off-setting the carbon emissions brought about producing a certain product against tree planting was now perceived as environmentally unfriendly! Another pointed out that if we continued down this route then Britain would once again turn back into a highly tree dense land...