House building costs have soared, and this has become a greater problem due to the need to rebuild more resistant houses since last year’s earthquakes. Yet, it is possible to build a completely ecological and earthquake-resistant house with local resources for a really low price.

A bioclimatic house built with natural low-cost components is earthquake and flood resistant. That is the purpose of Abari and Strawbuilt, two associations that have been working together since 2015 and are specialised in ecoconstruction. The type of building technique they advocate is simple. It consists of using natural materials that are found in the earth and are specific to each region of the world to find the appropriate mix and create a natural alternative to cement, which is highly polluting. As pointed out by Bee Rowan, director of Strawbuilt, we can think of cement as being just a by-product of carbon dioxide factories—for every tonne of cement produced, 1.25 tonnes of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere.

The Romans and the Arabs

As the head trainer explained, lack of resistance of cement was made evident during the 2013 floods in Pakistan where Strawbuilt worked in partnership with UK Aid to help rebuild the houses that were destroyed. They were able to show people the pertinence of building their own flood-proof houses using natural materials like soil, sand, water, oil, animal dung and lime. The use of this last material is especially revolutionary as limestone mixes are much more efficient than cement, and lime follows a natural cycle that makes it stronger with time. Moreover, as limestone has to be burnt to extract lime, a new technology is developed to do it with solar energy as it can be environmentally-friendly.

Their aim is now to spread this knowledge in Nepal where recurrent natural disasters cause major damage and create a need to build more resistant houses. Far from being an innovation, this type of construction is historical: The Romans, for example, used non-hydraulic lime in construction, as did the first Arab builders of the famous palace and fortress Al-Hambra, which was built in 889 AD.

Construction is a major issue in Nepal. There is a need to build earthquake-resistant and flood-resistant houses to face the issues brought by the monsoon, particularly in the Tarai. Nowadays, cement is the most common material used in construction; but it is not the most resistant, economical or ecological building material. Moreover, it reinforces Nepal’s dependence on India as most of it needs to be imported. Ecoconstruction is an alternative, but it is not widely known. The partnership between Abari and Strawbuilt highlights the pertinence of gathering complementary ecoconstruction techniques. The aim, according to Rowan, is to “recover the relationship with the earth and its natural materials, as both people and the environment can benefit directly from it”. 

The challenge

A month ago, Abari, which specialises in building modern structures with earth and bamboo, and Strawbuilt, which specialises in the use of natural materials, held a workshop to introduce volunteers to lime stabilised and bamboo construction. Besides promoting a building technique, the workshop showed how sharing self-construction techniques can empower the people to be more self-sufficient. Every part of the decision process of self-construction was explained to the volunteers, from the different qualities of each material to the techniques to test the pressure or the tension of the blocks formed. The workshop allowed the participants to build an entire ecological and low-cost house. It underlines the fact that natural responses exist to face the dependence on the building industry and its mass production that is costly both economically and environmentally.

Now, the big challenge for the ecoconstruction sector is to get people to trust this lime-building technique and stop thinking of cement as the strongest material. In Pakistan, more than 10,000 houses were constructed using lime because the floods called into question the necessity of rebuilding with cement. During the 2015 earthquake, the temples that did not collapse were built with lime. After the disaster, the cost of bricks went through the roof. A lot of labourers fly to the Middle East to work, increasing the cost of labour. It makes more sense to build with bamboo and lime.

Fronty works in sustainable development in Nepal; Bezzaz studies political science in Canada