The Impact of Building Material Choices on Indoor Air Quality: Creating Healthier Indoor Spaces

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The Impact of Building Material Choices on Indoor Air Quality: Creating Healthier Indoor Spaces

hen we think about the comfort of our homes or workplaces, indoor air quality (IAQ) often isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. We’re quick to consider aesthetics, energy efficiency, or even layout, but the air we breathe inside these spaces, which plays a crucial role in our well-being is often ignored. With most people spending about 90% of their time indoors, IAQ can directly affect our health, mood, and productivity. And here’s the kicker: the materials used in your building or renovation project can make or break your indoor air quality.

At Small Planet Supply, we believe that creating healthier indoor environments starts with smarter choices in building materials. Let’s dive into how you can make those choices to improve your IAQ and, ultimately, your quality of life. 

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Rancho Cielo: Age is No Barrier to Building a Sustainable Building Future

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Rancho Cielo: Age is No Barrier to Building a Sustainable Building Future

With all the emphasis on the importance of designing energy-efficient buildings, it can sometimes get lost that there also needs to be a qualified workforce to build them.  There can also be the assumption that this can only be done at the post-secondary level.  Rancho Cielo’s building construction academy in Salinas, California demonstrates that solid construction skills can be taught to even younger participants.  Rancho Cielo Construction Academy is one of several vocational programs run by Rancho Cielo. Participants in the program range from ages 16-24 years of age.

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Using ThermaCork Lowers Building Carbon With Style

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Using ThermaCork Lowers Building Carbon With Style

As the evolution of high-performance building evolves, the focus on carbon has increased from not just measuring how much energy a building uses to operate, but also measuring the amount of carbon used in constructing a building as well as end of life carbon cost.  Luckily, a product you may already know can help you manage your carb(on)s. That product is ThermaCork. 

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Climate, Carbon and Cork: Using ThermaCork to Decrease Embodied Carbon in Your Build

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ThermaCork continues to be a very popular product with Small Planet Supply customers. Between the natural beauty and impressive insulative value, there is certainly a lot to love about this 100% natural product. One great thing not everyone is aware of though is how ThermaCork has a less than zero carbon footprint. This negative carbon footprint is an important part of the fight against climate change and ThermaCork is a great way to help bring down the overall carbon footprint of a building.

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Painting and Staining ThermaCork - A “Near Year” Update

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Painting and Staining ThermaCork - A “Near Year” Update

Do you have a project that you think would be perfect for ThermaCork, but the only thing holding you back is the color of finished product? If you have ever wondered about the viability of painting, staining, or sealing our ThermaCork Façade panels, hopefully the results of this ongoing backyard test can answer your questions.

If you’re just tuning in to this test, you can find the original article here, and there is a quick recap on the methodology below. If you’re returning to see the results after the last check-in, feel free to skip ahead!

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Painting and Staining ThermaCork

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Painting and Staining ThermaCork

Do you have a project that you think would be perfect for ThermaCork, but the only thing holding you back is the color of finished product? If you have ever wondered about the viability of painting, staining, or sealing our ThermaCork Façade panels, hopefully the results of this backyard test can answer your questions.

The Issue

While ThermaCork makes a wonderful insulator and is a great option for a natural exterior façade, the plain color of it is not always for everyone. When left in its natural state, ThermaCork ranges from a dark brown to a light tan. This color variance comes from natural variance between cork harvests, and from environmental changes in the final installed location such as humidity, temperature, and exposure to sunlight.

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ThermaCork Hives Become Bees' New Sweet Spot

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ThermaCork Hives Become Bees' New Sweet Spot

I’ve been a hobby beekeeper for several years, and I’m always looking for ways to help my bees survive the myriad of challenges they face. To that end, I’ve tried to design hives that mimic the honey bee’s natural log homes as much as possible. Back in January, I wrote a guest post for Small Planet Supply about our experiments keeping honey bees in cork insulated beehives.

stumbled on Thermacork while searching for a natural alternative to foam insulation for my beehives. I had been building hives out of two inch thick lumber, but it was heavy and didn’t really offer that much more insulation despite its additional weight and expense. After using Thermacork on my hive’s roof, I thought, “Why not coat the whole hive with this wonderful stuff?” So I did, and Cork Hives was born.

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Designing Healthy Building Assemblies Using ThermaCork - Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Cork

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Designing Healthy Building Assemblies Using ThermaCork - Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Cork

In this blog post, Small Planet Supply’s Josh Palmer explains how builders and homeowners can confidently use cork in their building assemblies.

If you’re someone whose fallen in love with natural properties of ThermaCork but are unsure whether you can use it to insulate your home, then this blog post is for you!   As we’ve outlined in previous blog posts, cork has been used for hundreds of years as an insulation material and ThermaCork is composed of 100% cork, is carbon-negative and has no chemicals added in production.  Builders and homeowners who are considering cork may worry whether using cork as insulation puts them at risk for developing mold.  The simple answer is no, if the wall assembly is done correctly.  More details about mold, mold prevention and correct wall assembly are outlined in this blog post. 

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Beekeeper Uses ThermaCork in Innovative Cork Hive Design

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Beekeeper Uses ThermaCork in Innovative Cork Hive Design

Liz Miller is our guest blogger this month. She is using ThermaCork to build beehives in Washington state. In this interesting blogpost she details the inspiration for and creation of Cork Hives as well as the origin of her love of bees.

It’s all over the news: Pollinators, including the honey bee, are in trouble. Commercial beekeepers, despite feeding and medicating their bees, lost 40% of their hives last year. Hobby beekeepers often fare worse, losing all of the hives in their small apiaries each winter.

I've always loved insects, but I think my fascination with bees started when I was a little girl living in San Jose, California, and our neighbors kept honey bees.

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Flat Walls are So Last Year - Start 2020 with Some Textured Flare

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Flat Walls are So Last Year - Start 2020 with Some Textured Flare

Sometimes at Small Planet we get so focused on the energy-saving aspects of our products that we forget to showcase what you can do with our materials inside your home. Case in point, ThermaCork decorative cork panels. What’s so appealing about these panels is that you don’t need to be in the process of building a house to use this product, you can use it now.

Decorative cork panels are great to have inside your home, as they are non-toxic and sound absorbing as well as beautiful.

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Insulation Project Wins Science Fair & Shows ThermaCork is a Winner Too

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Insulation Project Wins Science Fair & Shows ThermaCork is a Winner Too

ThermaCork is a 100% natural product that appeals to customers who value its insulation and accoustic properies. While we’re accustomed to hearing good things from our customers, we were delighted to receive an email from one of our youngest customers, Jenna, who used ThermaCork in her eighth grade science fair project. When Jenna sent an email to us (in the side bar to the right), we just had to learn more.

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When ‘No Sound’ Sounds Good: Using Thermacork and Other Materials To Manage Noise

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When ‘No Sound’ Sounds Good: Using Thermacork and Other Materials To Manage Noise

At Small Planet Supply we get a lot of inquiries about using ThermaCork for soundproofing applications.  With noise pollution increasing, even while other forms of pollution are remaining steady or decreasing, finding ways to turn down the volume is important.  

If you’re already trying to cut down on harmful VOCs, solvents and environmentally destructive production processes in your home or project, the next logical step is to design for noise reduction. 

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ThermaCork: Seven Reasons Why We Love This Durable, Sustainable Building Material

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ThermaCork: Seven Reasons Why We Love This Durable, Sustainable Building Material

Small Planet Supply has been importing and selling ThermaCork expanded cork since 2012. While we’ve been sold on the outstanding qualities of cork for years, we may not have been as great at communicating to others why we think it is one of the best building materials on the market today. So, in honor of seven years of ThermaCork, we’re going to share seven reasons why we love ThermaCork.

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Cork on the Outside of the Bottles

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Cork on the Outside of the Bottles

Last Friday, Albert Rooks and I were in Lisbon for our third Amorim Cork Conference. The two-day conference highlights innovations in cork use. Amorim is the world's largest cork producer and manufactures cork flooring, cork stoppers for wine and our own Thermacork.

This year, following a tour of the factory (more on the factory tour soon), we were surprised with a site visit much more fun then last year's school tour - Fitapreta Winery, located outside of Evora.

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