Great questions. A project of this kind that is built with volunteer labor requires a fair amount of education and organizing and not everyone is available all the time. Many of the details executed on this are complex for even the highly experience in the professional industry, so when you consider that people with little to no building experience were the ones doing the primary construction the timeline was actually quite remarkable. This project would have taken a year in a typical professionally serviced process.

The materials used were primarily wood and cellulose, chosen for their low embodied energy. The building that was on the site before used approximately 15 times the amount of energy this larger building will consume. Those energy savings alone have a carbon repayment impact period of less than 5 years relative to the embodied energy of the materials that went into the project. This means that over its lifetime the CLI will dramatically decrease the overall carbon consumption path the site previously had. All of the storm water on site is now either cleansed, cooled, and treated on the roof of the building or in the natural planted bio-swale that collects from the parking area. Yes, I would say overall the use of resources and the increased utilization of the site from what existed previously in this relative low density area is increasing the sustainability of the site.

Do you think the usage of resources and unused space increase sustainability of the site?