Recycled and Rapidly Renewable Materials

A great deal of thought went into the type of materials we used in our building's construction. Many of the materials are made from recycled content or from rapidly renewable materials. Rapidly renewable materials — unlike those made from petroleum, which is non-renewable, or old-growth timber, which takes centuries to renew — have very short harvest cycles (10 years or less) and require less energy and fewer resources to produce.

Examples of recycled materials used in our building include:

  • Carpeting made from used car tires and other recycled materials
  • Countertops made with discarded and recycled glass
  • Café tables made from scrap machine-shop metal shavings
  • Chairs made from Coca-Cola plastic bottles
  • Concrete with byproduct fly ash or slag composition
  • Building slab and parking-lot underlayment made of discarded, crushed masonry

Examples of rapidly renewable materials used include:

  • Cork flooring (live-harvested from cork oak trees)
  • Linoleum flooring (made from linseed oil, wood flour, cork dust and pine rosin)
  • Bamboo doors, counters and cabinets
  • Wheat board (wheat stalk) cabinets
  • Kirei Board (sorghum stalk) toilet partitions