Walled Paper – Interior insulation panels by Concrete Blond.
by Petz Scholtus, Barcelona, Spain on 12.27.05
For pure TreeHugger style Concrete Blond’s customised insulation panels for domestic spaces won our vote last week when we checked out the Design Council’s Future Currents project. In the ‘Hot Products’ section, where designers were asked to make energy saving proposals for the home, these concrete panels stood out for their simplicity and style. The panels create a false wall, behind which an insulating material can be placed and they are designed to be decorated with your own choice of wallpaper print.
As the Future Currents site tells us these panels would be a great product for older homes with solid walls which would be difficult to insulate otherwise. We like them for their ability to simply blend in with the domestic space without dominating it or being too gadgety. However on closer inspection while these design products might be designed to save energy, we are sceptical about the designers' use of materials. An energy saving product is a step into the right direction, but as we often mention on TreeHugger a holistic approach is needed. If you are producing an energy saving product which uses unsustainble materials then you've fallen at the first hurdle. Thanks to Mosier for his comment on the last post suggesting an itemised energy statement, detailing the energy use in each room of the house. We’d like to hear more of your thoughts on these proposals and I am sure the Design Council would too. If you don’t know what we’re talking about then its time to recover from your Christmas hangover and start conserving energy for the new year at ::Future Currents ::Concrete Blond
[Leonora & Petz]
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Another cool insulation that is very green friendly is biobased insulation: www.biobased.net
IMO, it is defenitly the best and most green insulation out there.
Excellent product with lots of possibilities! Can you make it out of recycled concrete? http://www.cement.org/tech/cct_aggregates_recycled.asp
Lately I've been thinking about radiant heating. These walls could have radiant heaters built into them as well as serving as support for insulation.