Sounds Like an Oxymoron: Building Codes & Sustainable Building

Musing about sustainable building codes, Meyers writes that it:This is a quick plug for a great blog. Feel free to read our short recommendation below or go to Tom Meyers’ Sustainable Building Codes now.

sounds like an oxymoron…this blog is intended to provide a little insight on green and sustainable building practices from a building official’s perspective. I tend to be a little more “liberatarian” than my counterparts. I am actively working to see that innovative housing is not inhibited by excess regulation and overzealous attempts to dictate “individual safety”.

Mr. Meyers is actually a building code regulator and active in the revision of modern building codes. He comments that he’s “concerned about the effect regulation has on the production of affordable and sustainable residential construction in the US.”

According to his bio, he is the building official for the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon (2005, 2007, 2009, and 2011) and sits as the Chairman of the International Code Council’s International Residential Code B/E Committee.

He also serves as one of the co-chairman of the Colorado Chapter of ICC Code Change and Code Development Committee.

More personally, he comments that he’s married with two cats and lives in a 1250sf house built in 1922 that has been modified for energy efficiency. He plans to (someday) build a “straw bale house…or maybe an earth bag, or rammed earth, or cob, or cordwood, or adobe, or earthship,” house. He’s an interesting blogger…check his ideas out at Tom Meyers’ Sustainable Building Codes…read about “Rural Sensibility,” tiny house musings and more.

We encourage small house and other alternative building enthusiasts to keep forward thinking people like Tom Meyers writing about these issues.