Categorie: Embodied Land

Half the agricultural land for biobased materials…

Last week I published a letter in the Netherlands, in which I indicated that about 800,000 hectares of land would be needed for the construction of new homes. That’s how it works in a transition: We have to significantly reduce the impact of building. And it is becoming increasingly clear…

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Land, between heaven and earth

It is intriguing how the world fundamentally works, with its cycles, driven mainly by solar energy. Which can be traced back mainly to the yields of land, as I found out earlier. [1,2] (Land that has virtually disappeared from economic theory as a production factor). But yields from land is…

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land (-potential) as the new money standard

Someone suggested recently to think about a new money standard. Well, thats a challenge, so I did. Since money is a virtual unit of trade, not based on any actual value. Not anymore, at least, since we left the barter economy and entered the money exchange economy, somewhere around 1600,…

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Living from 2 hectares, and not even that…

During the holidays I was philosophizing about the previous article, the biomass growth reference. And look, it is actually very simple: per person there is about 2 ha on earth for each of us. That is everyone’s personal “resource bubble”. You actually have to provide food, collect energy, building materials,…

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A New Year, New chances…: ‘Homo Vermis’

It is now exactly 10 years ago around Christmas that I struggled with the interpretation of ‘cycles’. Why I wondered, is everyone convinced there are two resource cycles, as promoted nowadays in whats called the circular economy? And why would we treat these differently? And at some moment around New…

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Let nature do the work… EROI in agriculture

A few months ago I wrote about agriculture, and that the EROI was 0.16: 1 (energy return on (energy) investment) – on average across all agricultural products in the Netherlands, and the EL (Embodied Land) no less than 7.7 ha-year / ha year. Much more goes in than comes out,…

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Circular cities..? Real time material flows for London

Since it looks as if we are going to introduce the climate measures for buildings mainly via municipalities or cities, I have recovered some of my older research material about urban sustainability, developed when I worked at Wageningen University. The urban approach makes sense, buildings are not isolated functions, they…

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Every agriculture hectare requires 7,7 ha input…. Embodied Land

Before going into agriculture, and the available figures for it, I will briefly summarize how evaluate keeping resource loops closed. Fot this a calculation method has been developed, called MAXergy, with Embodied Land as a measuring unit. To close resource cycles, or to keep them closed, a number of conditions…

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Lowering building impact

How are we going to ensure that buildings will be sustainable, that is to say, with the least impact on the environment, concerning raw materials depletion, loss of biodiversity and, above all, CO2 emissions as the most urgent effect of our construction and consumption drive? Earlier I wrote that the…

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Building wind turbines to dry laundry…?

Do we really want a CO2-neutral society, or even a society with closed cycles? If yes, a lot will have to change and we will need to become extremely creative. And not directly with the input of a lot of ’technology’, in the sense of high tech, but back to…

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