CAT Trip 2013 : Centre for Alternate Technology

The trip to the Centre of Alternate Technology proved a very valuable experience as it opened my eyes up to many new and existing ways materials could be used in an innovative way as part of a buildings structure, as a replacement for non-sustainable materials and as a use for packaging too!

Innovative use of materials - Architecture and more!

Innovative sustainable insulation was a big thing at CAT and they had many solutions in terms of materials!

 Pertile!

 Cellulose!

 Cork!

 Clay piping was also an alternative for plastic piping used in ducts & drains.

 I found this wall, where they had used many recycled materials - what a great secondary use!

Wales was  definatley not short on sheep's wool! They used it as insulation in some of the walls.

The Information Centre/shop and the new circular lecture hall both used compressed earth as the structure for the walls. The earth had been compressed by more then x7 to maintain strength and durability! In the shop they unfortunately used timber as supports without drying it first ( as it takes to much energy ) causing it to shrink and break!

 A lot of glass was used as lighting and an energy source! although it did effect keeping the warmth in so it had to be used wisely.

CAT sits on an old slate quarry and you can see many of the buildings around using this natural resource in the roofing and even the stones in the walls.

Inside the lecture hall it was furnished with wood, the earth walls seemed to do a great job of keeping the warmth in however it did get quite dark in there, there were wooden pannels you could slide back for extra light in exchange for some of the heat.They even used the wood for sound proofing at the back.

Jo Gwillim - Sustainable Design Talk

Jo presented us with some striking facts and figures about waste in energy and materials. He also showed us a few materials we could use sustainably in the workshop task he ran. Here are a few notes I made on the talk he gave...

99% of the materials in the US are thrown away in 6 months, and in britains its 98%.

'It is sustainable if you can carry on doing it forever' -  Jonathon porritt

'Sustainability is not cheating on yourself, not cheating on your children, not cheating on the planet.'  - Jo Gwillim

In Britain we use 195 kWhrs per person a day!
60 kWhrs are used transporting and making the things we buy.As well as thinking about the recycling of materials we also need to be concerned about how much energy it takes to create the goods/packaging out of material, this is know as the embodied energy ( calculated in ms/kg)

Here are a few examples of some materials embodied energy, this relates heavily to( and will impact the choice of ) the material we will use for packaging design for the paint tins!

Using recycled materials as a massive benefit in terms of the bodied energy as you can see from the image below it is reduced drastically.

 The Task we were set by Jo was to see which of these insulators were the best! there wasnt much in it in the end, to our surprise the hemp lime featured pretty high up the scale! It was that good they had experimented with using it as a building material there at CAT.

A few interesting signs with some great advice and some shocking figures! e.g the average household releases 8.2 tonnes of CO2 a year! Energy generated by the solar panel roof -61563kwh since October 2006, 35090 kg green house gas emissions saved by the solar panel roof!