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EnstoToday 2016 No1 / ENG

ensto today | SUSTAINABILITY Postcard: 26 ENSTO TODAY 1/2016 Sustainable Zambia Earth House CEO Sami Juola standing in front of a prototype of an Earth House family home in Zambia. Building should be simple, fast, and should not require special skills, at least on a small scale,” argues Sami Juola, CEO of Earth House. Earth House offers sustainable homes that can be built in 14 days by fewer than 25 people without the foot-print left by traditional construction techniques. Juola points out the irony: his family pedigree is in steel and concrete. His father and Earth House partner, architect Tuomo Juola, designed Finland’s first all-steel office building. Noble Origins It was his father’s idea to create the Earth House. “Our first idea was to serve areas of catastrophe by creating a replacement for tents,” says Juola, who notes that the tent is still the most widely used solution for catastrophe areas. “In refugee camps the average time for people to live in tent is more than three years. There should at least be a transitional shelter, something other than just a tent.” An Earth House struc-ture’s first stage can be finished in 24 hours and serve as the skeleton for a tent. It then maybe be added to as required, until it’s a complete home. But the catastrophe-relief idea was not an immediate suc-cess. The buyers for the emergency and catastrophe business are few, and often governments or NGOs who are quite conserva-tive. “Even though we’re on the UN vendor list, doesn’t mean we can do business with the UN,” says Juola. “It’s a long road.” Plan B The long road took a detour – to Zambia. Earth House has created a scalable home, a 75-square-meter turnkey solution with the price of approximately 35,000 euros. At this price, the home offers clean water, sanitation, hygiene, and limited energy supply. The home is built with modular steel frames, inlaid adobe brick insulation, and plastered with clay both inside and out. Local labor and materials are used when available. The finished price is 20 to 30 percent cheaper than a traditional structure, including a 10 to 15 percent profit margin for Juola’s company. These numbers require volume, however, and 100 struc-tures are needed – basically a village. When you need to sell a whole village, where do you turn? It turns out, to a mining company. Sustainable mining? To begin to reach the needed scale requires contracts with approximately 15 to 30 families. “We make a deal with the fami-lies, and mining companies guarantee the loans,” says Juola. Mining companies like Canada’s Barrick Gold Corporation need housing for junior staff in Zambia’s copper belt. Barrick’s safety standards rival that of anywhere in the west, says Juola, and its in their interest to support a sustainable local economy. Barrick, however, is able to buy only three percent of what it needs from Zambia. The country lacks a supply chain and dis-tribution channels.


EnstoToday 2016 No1 / ENG
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