Mar 2 2011
The International Center for Sustainable Development (ICSD) today announced plans to design and construct affordable, self-sufficient housing for disaster relief in Pakistan.
With over 30 years' experience in responding to international crises through rebuilding efforts, John Spears, ICSD Founder, and his team have partnered with a Pakistani family to build five Earth Home models, using local materials and local workers.
In the summer of 2010, natural disaster hit the Indus River Valley Basin in eastern Pakistan. According to the Pakistani government, two million homes were destroyed. As of January 31, the relief phase of Pakistan's operations has ended, despite the fact that four million people remain homeless. In an effort to pick up where the relief efforts left off, John and his team traveled to Pakistan in late January and selected the ideal site in the Punjab Province for the first demonstration project.
ICSD has stepped in with its Earth Home system, a fully integrated self-sufficient building system, using local materials to meet all the needs of the occupants for comfort, water, sanitary waste, electricity, hot water and cooking, without the need for central power, water or sewer. Earth Homes use the sun to heat the home, cook food and generate electricity. Clean rain water is collected and stored for drinking and bathing. Kitchen and toilet waste is composted to rich fertilizer for the family garden.
"It's a great joy to bring my experience building sustainable homes in the DC area to international areas devastated by natural disasters," said Spears, president and CEO, International Center for Sustainable Development and president, Sustainable Design Group. "Sustainable design has improved so much in the past couple of decades that we are now able to build these self-sufficient homes to get these communities back on their feet and improve the quality of life for those affected by the destruction."
The Earth Home is a flexible building system that uses local natural resources to build homes, schools, clinics and other low-rise buildings. In addition, the Earth Home system is very easy to build with unskilled labor and perfect for volunteer housing projects. As a result, the Earth Home system produces buildings that are affordable, comfortable, durable, and disaster proof. Not to mention that they are environmentally sustainable.
Source: http://sustainabledesign.com/