“At ESR we design sustainable solutions to waste and energy challenges. These solutions weave together engineering and ecological thinking and are deeply embedded in the economic, social, and cultural context of their application.
natural building
Green Village Bamboo Houses
Oh boy, I think I just found my favorite bamboo house. This is top, top quality. A rare combination of sustainability, immaculate craftsmanship and stunning beauty.
Pocket Gardens
Pocket gardens occupy tiny spaces in your yard – the type of places most people would frequently overlook. Pocket gardens go in gaps between pavers, small planters, unused borders, and other nooks and crannies. They break up monotonous spaces by softening the environment with a touch of color and texture.
Affordable Luxury Homes
Home design ideas that may seem completely unobtainable for most consumers are possible if you build it yourself and cut out the obvious budget killers (home entertainment rooms, gold embossed trim, etc.). The photos shown here are likely from multi-million dollar homes. But if you break it down, decide what features are most important, eliminate the unnecessary, and possibly reduce the scale… then some dream designs can be affordable if you do the work yourself.
Free Heat for Your Home: Homemade Briquettes and Logs
Many people don’t have easy access to firewood or the tools and ability to cut, split, haul and stack it. Buying firewood may be out of your budget. Here we’ll present some virtually free ways of making fuel briquettes and logs at home with simple devices. To make briquettes/pellets/bricks/logs, you can use free materials such as newspapers, junk mail, cardboard, wood chips, wood shavings, sawdust, leaves, pine needles, manure, rice hulls, straw, corn stover and other biomass fibers. The basic process usually involves soaking the materials and then compacting them with a press into blocks.
Where the Haiti Relief Money Did and Did Not Go
A lot of our time and effort goes toward helping relief efforts in Haiti and other countries in need, so excuse me if this sounds like a rant. The following article truly disgusted me. The article breaks down how only a tiny amount out of several billion dollars in donations ever made it to help Haitians. This is appalling and shameful, and shouldn’t be allowed to happen. There needs to be a giant uproar over this to correct the situation, otherwise donors may not help in future crises. The good news is I believe there’s a fairly simple solution that could prevent this from happening again. I’ve outlined my “power to the people” proposal below after an excerpt from the article.