Rustic By Nature built a pallet greenhouse in Alaska with a rain gutter grow system for watering. It’s very low cost, simple and easy to build.
General
Rice hull concrete for cool room insulation
UC Davis designed a CoolBot cool room (excellent project for homesteaders!) using rice hull concrete for insulation and a CoolBot controller to keep farm produce fresher. The cool room paid for itself the first year and even helped make a good profit for local farmers. The rice hull concrete was poured into forms to make insulating wall boards. This blog post will briefly summarize the outcome of their project. The full report is available online for free and can be found by searching for the title of the report: Cool room insulation – UC Davis D-Lab
SpaceCrete (Formless Vertical Concrete)
This method allows concrete to be pumped into place to build walls without forms. Redimix concrete is delivered to the jobsite, then thickeners and accelerators as required are injected and intermixed in the pumping line, to give the fluid concrete the zero-slump-with-workability properties that you can see here.
How the Pyramids of Egypt were really built – Shaping the blocks
This animation describes how water could be used as a level during the shaping process of the blocks, used in the construction of the Giza Pyramid. The second video below shows the entire building process.
Aircrete Lightweight Bricks and Blocks
We discourage using lots of cement because of its adverse environmental impact. However, there are times when it makes sense. For instance, concrete is very useful for making strong bond beams and water resistance structures in rainy climates. Foamed or lightweight concrete such as aircrete has become very popular lately because its lighter weight reduces labor and improves the insulation value. Bricks and blocks are the defacto international building unit, so I did a search for “aircrete blocks” and found the Forterra company in the UK, who is a major supplier of these green building blocks. Their products are profiled below.
Affordable Green Transport Options – Taxi Apps and E-bikes
Some of the greenest, most affordable transport options are now appearing in countries such as India and Cambodia. Uber has finally arrived in Cambodia, but the local alternatives are better established and often less expensive. PassApp Taxis, Exnet Taxi, and iTsumo are Uber-like taxi apps operating in Phnom Penh that allow you to book a metered tuk tuk, taxi, or SUV with the touch of a button (theoretically).