Eco friendly need not mean vastly expensive. We met cost-conscious housing developer Terry Rogers, who uses recycled newspapers as insulation in his homes
The mere mention of sustainability can be a turn-off, conjuring up a wacky, sandal-shod world of ecological piety. But for Terry Rogers, 59, a speculative developer of eco-homes, sustainable construction does not mean discarding sound business practice. For Rogers, cost-effectiveness is as important as eco-friendliness. He puts his building costs at around £55 per square foot, which is close to traditional residential building costs.

Rogers bans from his houses materials that harm the environment, the construction workers who install them or the eventual occupants. Standard gloss paints, which contain formaldehyde, petrochemicals and volatile organic chemicals, are out and wood is treated instead with herb and resin oils and waxes, while lime render goes on the outside walls.

The exclusion of toxic materials naturally extends to insulation. Expanded polystyrene and glass fibre mineral wool don't make the cut. The former is petrochemical-based, while the latter is a health hazard and requires special handling and disposal. Newspaper, though, does make the sustainable grade.

Warmcel from Excel consists of recycled newspaper pellets that can be installed without masks, glasses and gloves because they contain no toxic chemicals. It is also a very effective insulator, with a U-value of 0.1. Rogers is a big fan. "It's soft and gentle stuff, like human hair," he says, "so it's great for the installers, but it's also fantastic value for insulation. There isn't much that beats it."

At one of Rogers' eco-houses insulated with Warmcel, the radiators only go on in December and are switched back off in January. Insulation doesn't get much better than that.

As well as thermal performance, Warmcel offers breathability. When combined with Excel's external and internal membranes, it allows moisture to travel through the roof, wall or floor to the outside of the building, helping prevent condensation forming in the cavities.

For his latest development - a three-storey, 12m long by 9m wide home at Congresbury, 12 miles south of Bristol - Rogers wrapped the entire structure in Warmcel, using prefabricated wall panels, roof plates and floor cassettes from Excel. The closed timber panels allow builders to put up the shell of a house within a day; Rogers managed it in just over 22 hours, as part of a BBC programme, The 24-Hour House, to be screened this Spring.

The installers then pumped Warmcel into the panels. "It was a bit like refuelling a car in a grand prix," says Rogers. Builders can also wet-spray Warmcel into a timber frame, levelling it off before covering it with timber.

Because Warmcel is a loose-fill material blown from a hose, rather than a cut-to-size quilt, it leaves no gaps in insulation. And with the latest Building Regulations insisting that quilted insulation should be cross-laid over roof rafters to boost thermal performance, the product could cut down on installation time.

While Rogers says he's always liked the idea of reusable materials, what really fires him up is better living conditions. "People go into a house built from natural materials and they immediately know the difference," he says. "It's fresh, bright and clean." In fact, Rogers doesn't push the sustainability angle to prospective buyers at all: they assume that the properties are standard houses. You can see why: they look modern rather than yurt-like weird or self-sufficiently fuddy-duddy.

Many construction companies do little more than track the Building Regulations, a purely reactive strategy of compliance. Rogers says the big companies that pay him visits are interested in what he's doing, but not convinced.

In his experience, the real enthusiasm for sustainable construction comes from subbies. His projects call for a greater range of decision making from tradesmen than normal, such as sitting down and working out which materials will best reduce energy consumption.

Subbies also benefit personally from using non-toxic materials. For example, the houses use only natural, water-based emulsions and glosses, so the painters go home without the headaches caused by the standard chemical cocktail.

So does the sustainable apostle live in an eco-house himself? Well, no. Back in the early 1990s, his barn conversion business went bust, taking with it the £750,000 investment his original stake of £10,000 had turned into. Since then, he's lived in a flat in Bristol. Business is good, though, and Rogers reckons that in a couple of years he'll be able to live in the sort of place that he builds.

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Rags to riches

To make Warmcel, Excel feeds bales of newspapers through shredding machines, lifts out staples with a metal detector, pulps the paper with a hammer mill and forces it through a screen to turn it into balls of cellulose fibre, at which point it looks like finely chopped spaghetti. The grey mass is then compressed into bales, with installers using a machine to break the material up and blow it.

Both recycled and unsold newspapers end up at the company’s South Wales plant. Newspapers that have been read are easier to process because opening the pages aerates the paper.

Although Warmcel is nothing more than paper, the addition of magnesium sulphate means it chars rather than burns. You can attack it with a blowtorch, but it just turns black. The material survived 71 minutes in an official fire test, with the metal support holding it melting before the system broke up.

Source

Construction Manager