Biostruct – High-Performance Building Materials for Energy Efficient, Sustainable, Passive Solar and LEED Construction

At Biostruct, we see the world through the lens of systems thinking and value the interconnectedness of all things. Believing that trust and transparency are imperative in the corporate structure, we have built our company on this premise. Our business model, which will grow organically, includes utilizing bio-regional processing facilities, supporting local economies, creating green jobs, and keeping carbon-based transportation to a minimum. Using Biostruct natural building products will allow LEED-registered projects to obtain bonus credits for incorporating local non-toxic materials, and also to fit within the guidelines of the Materials Radius for Living Building projects.

Biomimicry is the conscious emulation of life’s genius. A design lens that tries to better understand living systems. Mimicking “Life’s Principles” –not only form, but function & process. Imagine a home for example, with a wall system which regulates internal conditions such as temperature, mimicking the homeostasis found in organisms. A wall that could last for generations, but if needed to be recycled later into the future, could easily return to the environment, without leaving any trace. Find out more about biomimicry at: www.asknature.org

What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place? The Living Building Challenge is a philosophy, advocacy tool and certification program that addresses development at all scales. It is comprised of seven performance areas: Site, Water, Energy, Health, Materials, Equity and Beauty. These are subdivided into a total of twenty Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific sphere of influence. The purpose of the Living Building Challenge is straightforward: it defines the most advanced measure of sustainability in the built environment possible today, and acts to diminish the gap between current limits and ideal solutions. Under the Materials Petal, the LBC calls on projects to “incorporate place-based solutions and contribute to the expansion of a regional economy rooted in sustainable practices, products and services.” The LBC includes a Red List of chemicals and materials that are prohibited in projects, and a Materials Radius prerequisite intended to encourage project teams to use locally available materials as much as possible. Companies such as Google, Perkins+Will and Stantech have all used the LBC to guide their decision-making in selecting the right material for a project.

The U.S. and Canada Green Building Council’s LEED program has been enthusiastically endorsed and recognized as one of the world’s foremost green building standards. LEED is a point-based system. Buildings can be recognized as Silver, Gold or Platinum. Many local municipalities have required all new government or commercial/multi-use buildings to meet the minimum level of LEED certification. LEED offers bonus credits for using local materials, minimizing carbon emissions and supporting the local economy.

The Living Building and Living Economy movements are intimately linked. The Living Building framework focuses attention on shelter and nutrition as the basic essentials of a human livelihood, seeking to remedy the dysfunctions of current infrastructure designs that isolate us from one another and operate in opposition to the biosphere’s natural generative processes. The living economies framework in turn focuses on networks of living enterprises in order to remedy the dysfunctions of an economic system that contributes to this same isolation and disconnect.  The ultimate goal of both the Living Building and the Living Economy movements is to bring the way we live into alignment with the structure and dynamics of Earth’s biosphere, which self-organizes locally everywhere to optimize the sustainable utilization of energy, water, and nutrients in support of life. The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, is North America’s fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks in 30 U.S. states and Canadian provinces representing over 22,000 independent business members across the U.S. and Canada.

Today, Internet technology and renewable energies are beginning to merge to create a new infrastructure for a Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) that will change the way power is distributed in the 21st century. While the TIR economy allows millions of people to produce their own virtual information and energy, a new digital manufacturing revolution now opens up the possibility of following suit in the production and manufacturing of durable goods.

In the same way that the Internet radically reduced entry costs in generating and disseminating information, digital and additive manufacturing have the potential to greatly reduce the cost of producing hard goods, making entry costs sufficiently lower to encourage hundreds of thousands of mini manufacturers — small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) — to challenge and potentially outcompete the giant manufacturing companies that were at the center of the First and Second Industrial Revolution economies. The energy saved at every step of the digital manufacturing process, from reduction in materials used to less energy expended in making the product, if applied across the global economy, adds up to a qualitative increase in energy efficiency beyond anything imaginable in the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. When the energy used to power the production process is renewable and also generated on site, the full impact of a lateral Third Industrial Revolution becomes strikingly apparent. Since approximately 84 percent of the productivity gains in the manufacturing and service industries are attributable to increases in thermodynamic efficiencies — only 14 percent of productivity gains are the result of capital invested per worker — we begin to grasp the significance of the enormous surge in productivity that will accompany the Third Industrial Revolution and what it will mean for society.

The democratization of manufacturing is being accompanied by the tumbling costs of marketing. The internet has transformed marketing from a significant expense to a negligible cost, allowing startups and small and medium size enterprises to market their goods and services on internet sites that stretch over virtual space, enabling them to compete and even out-compete many of the giant business enterprises of the 20th Century. As the new 3-D technology becomes more widespread, on site, just in time customized manufacturing of products will also reduce logistics costs with the possibility of huge energy savings. The cost of transporting products will plummet in the coming decades because an increasing array of goods will be produced locally in thousands of micro-manufacturing plants and transported regionally by trucks powered by green electricity.

The lateral scaling of the Third Industrial Revolution allows small and medium size enterprises to flourish. Still, global companies will not disappear. Rather, they will increasingly metamorphose from primary producers and distributers to aggregators. In the new economic era, their role will be to coordinate and manage the multiple networks that move commerce and trade across the value chain. The rapid decline in transaction costs brought on by the Third Industrial Revolution are leading to the democratization of information, energy, manufacturing, marketing, and logistics, and the ushering in of a new era of distributed capitalism that is likely to change the very way we think of commercial life in the 21st Century. (The five pillars of TIR have now been endorsed by the E.U. Parliament).