(upbeat music)
- You probably don't realize it,
but buildings account for 40% of our carbon emissions.
But the technology exists to make our homes
carbon neutral or even carbon negative,
like this house.
- This building uses about 90% less energy
than a typical building.
- This isn't just an energy efficient home,
it represents a new way of building homes.
A kit of parts that you assemble on site.
This means that appealing, sustainable homes
could soon be faster to build and more affordable
than traditional construction.
(upbeat music)
- This is Don Bunnell, one of the founders of NODE,
a start up that is making flat pack housing.
- Why do we still build homes
the way we did 100 years ago?
Why does it take a year to build a house?
It doesn't make any sense, and this is fundamentally
an engineering and industrial design problem.
We're working on a flat pack system
that is engineered to go together
really quickly and really easily.
- It's a bit like IKEA,
where packing the components of furniture into flat boxes,
makes it massively easier to ship them,
and you can assemble it on site.
- We find that when we say IKEA,
people think that's so cheap,
and I always get into a fight
building a bookcase with my partner.
We find what other people say is IKEA
works really well for us.
But what if the home kit were that easy to install?
What if someone who could install an IKEA kitchen
could install a NODE house?
- This building is a prototype
for a carbon negative building,
so it makes more renewable energy than it consumes.
- Buildings account for about 40% of carbon emissions,
homes are about half of that.
We really started the company around,
how do we make buildings more sustainable?
- Don wanted to make homes that were
carbon neutral or negative.
He partnered with Bec Chapin to design
energy efficient homes made from
sustainable and non toxic materials.
- This is kind of this snapshot into
the very earliest of the NODE kit,
we're using a recycled denim insulation
instead of a fiberglass,
as well as a rigid foam wrap on the exterior,
we have EcoBatts in the ceiling,
all about 30% above code,
we've seen the cost of construction rise.
Don and I know that the only way that
we're gonna get sustainable homes to be the norm
is if we can build it cheaper.
So our prefab kit has to address cost.
- One of the things we are doing is
we're trying to make good design accessible to folks.
We figured out really early on that it's not impactful
if you can only make buildings for the 1%.
So if you make beautiful, sustainable buildings,
but it's only for rich people,
well, that really doesn't make a big impact,
'cause we really need to adopt this on a mass scale.
- We can put it in a container, put it on a train,
send it anywhere.
Two people can unload the whole thing.
Regular sized trucks, no specialty permits,
no specialty licenses.
When you're not shipping air,
you can ship more in smaller spaces,
but then it all comes down to the assembly.
- Right now, a big part of what makes
building homes expensive and slow is labor.
And there are labor shortages
in the trades connected to housing.
- The construction labor shortage
has been forecasted for a very, very long time.
Less people are going into trade schools
and trades positions,
more people going into computers
and high-tech jobs and service jobs.
In the great recession,
we lost a huge chunk of construction labor,
people who left the pool that never came back.
And we haven't seen the numbers yet,
but our new immigration policy in the US
is absolutely hurting housing.
Immigrants build houses, and they're not around anymore.
- One of the ways we get buildings to folks at scale
is to bring in a new workforce to bear on housing.
Our goal is to do it in under two weeks
with just four people, that totally changes the economics.
- Housing is one of the most basic human needs,
and right now,
we're not doing a good enough job of addressing it.
Homelessness is still a problem,
in even the most prosperous countries.
Could we make housing affordable enough
to make it as accessible and ubiquitous
as other manufactured goods?
- I think the assumption's always been
you can build really cheaply
or you can build really sustainably,
but you can't do both.
And our argument is you can actually have
well-designed, beautiful, sustainable homes
that are affordable to everybody.
We actually think that's a basic right.
So can you house people
and also do good things for the planet at the same time?
We think you can.
- I think one of the things that
we have in the US is enough,
we have enough money, we have enough smarts,
do we have enough will to fix the problem?
We can send space shuttles to space,
can we get everyone indoors?
- Thanks for watching.
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