Jeriko House

Environmental Information

Sustainability is a crucial factor in the design of the modern home and while the Jeriko House may bear little resemblance to the rustic architecture common to sustainable design, homeowners can feel confident that their Jeriko House can fully meet the environmental challenges of the 21^st Century.

Sustainability is embodied in a balance of three aspects; composition, consumption, and impact. What a house is made of, how it uses resources such as energy throughout its life, and its direct physical impact on the environment it is set in and the health of the people who live in it. All these must be taken into account in the pursuit of sustainability. A Jeriko House can aid this pursuit in many ways.

> Composition
Aluminum is a commonly recycled material that uses less energy to recycle than steel. But reuse is even better than recycling and here the Jeriko House offers something few other building systems can. Typical home construction destroys the reusability of materials as its using them. Every nail, every screw, every application of adhesive dooms each part of a house turning into trash should it ever be removed. Thanks to their demountability, Jeriko House components can be directly reused innumerable times as a home is renovated or modified. No need to fill up dumpsters with waste just to update your kitchen or bathroom. Just swap out the parts you no longer need in one place and put them to use somewhere else!

While we think of factories as sources of pollution, industrial prefabrication of parts offers much less materials and energy waste than is common in conventional home construction. And freed from the limitations of nails, screws, and adhesives for attachment, many more materials options become available for use in a home. There's no reason why a Jeriko House cannot be built almost entirely from a choice of recycled or renewable materials. In our Design section, you can see examples of many such materials available now, in particular a great variety of bamboo laminate and natural textile products.

> Consumption
Jeriko House offers you countless options in chasing the ideal of a reduced-energy or energy-independent home. Passive and active solar, wind power, geothermal heat pumps, home generators, and many other technologies are available now and easily employed with any Jeriko House design. And since a Jeriko House will never resist its own improvement as old fashioned architecture so often does, new alternative energy products will be easy to add as soon as they appear.

The Jeriko House building system's sophisticated integrated electrical and plumbing components also eliminate much of the power and water waste common in homes. Inefficient or faulty wiring wastes energy, can sometimes be a fire hazard, and generates unwanted EMF that can interfere with appliances and is suspected of impacting health. Meanwhile, commonly failure prone conventional plumbing often leads to hidden leaks that squander water and promote mold and rot. All this is virtually eliminated with the near-fool-proof and easily repaired plug-and-play infrastructure offered in a Jeriko House. Furthermore, there is little complication with deploying such cutting-edge infrastructure systems as fiber optic lighting, which can greatly reduce the energy overhead of typical lighting and further reduce the amount of home wiring.

> Impact
A home environmentally impacts both its surroundings and those who live within it. Outside, it can ruin natural habitats, disrupt water tables, and sometimes introduce toxins into the environment. Inside, it can pollute the air its inhabitants breath and the water they drink or bath in from the by-products of innumerable latently toxic materials commonly used in home construction today. A Jeriko House offers solutions for both sides of the impact equation.

Aluminum is naturally immune to pests, mold, and rot and thus the need for pressure-treated lumber or pesticide treatments around a home is reduced or eliminated. Post & beam framing is ideally suited to use with pier foundations that greatly minimize the disruption of water percolation or the need for radical landscape modification. The need for heavy equipment is eliminated by the use of a light modular component system which reduces the need to cut down or transplant trees just to make a site accessible or facilitate construction on it.

Inside, the combination of a naturally non-toxic aluminum primary structure and the option to easily use alternative wall and floor covering materials means that one has few barriers to insuring a totally low or non-toxic home environment. If there's a low-toxic or non-toxic alternative material available, there is no problem using it in a Jeriko House. Indeed, for the growing community of people with environmental intolerance, the Jeriko House offers the only turn-key pre-fab housing option on the market today.

Clearly, if your desire is the ultimate environmental showcase home, you'll have no problem realizing it with a Jeriko House.