Green Remodeling: Hoax, Hype, or Here to Stay?

Green remodeling has been a tough sell over the years. It's very much price-driven (on the balance, you can probably expect to spend extra to remodel "green" than otherwise), and builders and remodelers understandably have had bigger fish to fry than to deal with recycling those old composition shingles. And let's not forget you/us homeowners, either. Given a choice between El Cheapo Brand Drywall (with its twelve China-based plants consuming all of the power from the Three Gorges Dam, just so you can cover up your walls) vs. the more eco-friendly product which costs twice as much...well, which would you choose?

The problem of green remodeling has also been one of scale. You can probably stomach the extra cost off that one sheet of expensive "green" drywall, floorboard, countertop material etc. But that's not how home-building or remodeling operates. Multiply that single sheet of Sheetrock by 155, and you get a sense of the true out-of-pocket cost of green remodeling.

But times change, and before you know it, green remodeling becomes the norm. Sure, we're not there yet; not by any means. I liken it to smoking on airplanes. Remember, kids, when everyone smoked on airplanes? I do, but only barely. Non-smoking on airplanes has become such the norm, that it has crowded out most memories of the past. Companies like Serious Materials have spent huge amounts of money on plants for their EcoRock (green drywall) product, and it's when I see those big expenditures of money that I think I can pronounce it "here to stay," though with the caveat: "not there yet."

Image Public Domain: Portland (OR) Metro