Eco-Friendly Building

By Holli Haerr

As you may have noticed, being green sometimes costs extra money at first. For example, a CFL lightbulb costs a few bucks more than a "regular" lightbulb - but you save in the long run. 

If you're building a new house, being green can cost tens of thousands of extra dollars. And that can cause people to forgo solar panels, geothermal heat, special wood, extra insulation and other environmentally-friendly features.

A company based in Westhampton Beach is working to change that, and make building green easier on the wallet. Brian MacKinnon and Kyle Collins from The Green Nest recently showed me and photojournalist Dave Garden a home being built in Remsenberg that eliminates much of the cost factor.

How? It's a prefabricated house, built in a factory and assembled on site. Before you think, "Oh, it probably looks like a shoebox", guess again. As you can see from the pictures, the house that's under construction is not the type of pre-fab house that you see on the back of a truck, trundling down the LIE.

MacKinnon and Collins say the materials in the house are eco-friendly. In addition, since they just have to be put together at the construction site, they save more than 30 percent of the cost of a conventionally-built house. That savings can then be put into environmental features such as solar panels.

In addition, there's less waste. Since the items are pre-cut, the construction crew does very little sawing -- generating few scraps. Collins says they'll fill about 5 dumpsters of trash during construction instead of the 15 a project that size usually uses.

So, they'll cut down on trash AND on the trucks needed to transport the trash. (They also use a company that recycles whatever it can from the dumpster.)

If you want to find out more, you can check out their website at www.thegreennest.net.

Comments

[Zach]

Please go back and show us how this house turns out.