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This year, straw from Lithuania will envelop a building in the quiet town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire.
Barbara Jones and her colleagues at Todmorden Learning Centre and Community Hub have hatched a plan to clad the college, built in the 1950s, in more than 1,600 sq meters of straw-stuffed panels – to better insulate it.
“We’re going to make it a showcase,” says Ms Jones, an expert on natural building materials.
The panels will be supplied by EcoCocon, a Slovakian firm that has appointed Ms Jones as one of its technical sales consultants. Each timber-framed panel is around 400mm thick and contains a mass of chopped straw – essentially, a slightly more high-tech version of the simple straw bales that have been used by some eco-friendly builders for decades.
Such solutions have been around for years and other firms are selling similar products, but, with rising demand for insulation and sustainability, EcoCocon is now targeting larger-scale projects. The question is whether straw, a millennia-old building material, can scale up to meet 21st Century ambitions.
In panel systems, relatively short pieces of straw are packed together at just the right density, about 110 kg per metre cubed, so that the volume of air inside creates an insulating effect. Ms Jones says this also protects against fire. Loose straw, in contrast, is notoriously flammable.
Another handy feature is that the panels can be prepared with the straw protruding slightly. This means they can be pushed against an uneven wall and still form a tight seal –
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