Burning Styrofoam

I have been using the hot knife for the past couple days to fabricate the wall panels.

Burning EPS has a distinctive odor. It reminds me of the smell of Kathmandu in the evening; at the end of the business day, many shopkeepers kept a ritual where they would burn the trash from their day in the gutter. It's a nostalgic smell, that burning plastic aroma (especially when combined with the smell of cheap cigarettes that my crew-mates used to smoke on site). Ah, memories.

But actually, the burning foam, with its thick smoke and smell, made of pure petroleum-derived hydrocarbons, is composed of approximately the same elements as wood smoke: carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. Its smoke is less harmful than smoke from a pine fire.

Styrofoam may not seem to have much "green" cred, being a non-organic petroleum product, but it does have a couple things going for it:

It does create a super-efficient building envelope. My walls, when I'm done, will be as tight as a drum. Air leakage will be minimal, and the insulation value meets or exceeds requirements for such a tiny building. I expect that it won't be difficult to heat my tiny house.

Another benefit of EPS is that it is a durable use of petroleum. I drove to the worksite this morning burning a non-renewable resource (a situation I hope to remedy this summer when I start brewing bio-diesel from vegetable oil). Once petroleum is burnt, it's gone, and the carbon enters the atmosphere. My walls, on the other hand, utilize that same resource daily throughout the life of the building. As long as the walls are standing, the carbon that they are made of is, in the parlance of the green movement, "sequestered", meaning trapped, and providing me with a daily benefit.

Exploring the use of EPS foam in my building envelope is an interesting exercise in sustainability. The panels I am using are waste panels from an inefficient production process; I am saving them from becoming landfill or being incinerated in a waste-to-energy facility. The panels are a durable product which have a net benefit by saving energy over the course of their life-cycle. Large-scale usage of this product may or may not be ultimately sustainable, depending on the design of the manufacturing process. However, for my project, I feel pretty good about using SIPs, and I'm learning a lot in the process.

The sustainability of consuming petroleum products on the large scale that we do is highly questionable. Petroleum, though it is a non-renewable resource, is quite an amazing product. The versatile molecules can be cracked and recombined in a myriad of ways, resulting in an array of products that benefit us every day. Limited, judicious usage of petroleum products can be beneficial. Exploring sustainable alternative to petroleum such as biofuels and soy-based foam products is well worthwhile.