The country of France recently sided with environmental donors and mandated that new buildings must have solar panels or plants on the roof. Though the science is unclear, the belief is that this will naturally cool buildings or, in the case of planets, retain rainwater, reduce problems with runoffs and favor biodiversity.

Since environmentalists also once insisted that coral reefs should be built from tires, and that ending up costing 100X as much as it saved, politicians only agreed to partial coverings and only on new buildings in commercial zones. Time will tell if the plan is helping or if it is just a political placebo, like biofuels and wind energy.

More evidence-based is a recently launched European-funded research project called ISOBIO which aims to transform mainstream adoption of sustainable materials in building and construction - delivering significant energy efficiency improvements and wider environmental benefits with proven performance and effectiveness. Bio-based aggregates such as straw, clay, wheat or grasses mixed with innovative binders might hold the key to a more environmentally friendly construction process and substantial improvements in energy efficiency for everything from individual private residencies to major public buildings.

The ISOBIO project will develop these sustainable construction materials to enable demonstration at prototype level in an operational environment. The objective is to achieve a 50% reduction in embodied energy and CO2 at component level and 20% better insulation properties than conventional materials.

The project will seek to demonstrate a reduction of least 15% in total costs and 5% total energy spent over the lifetime of a building so it will not cost more than it saves, like the plants and solar panels scheme is likely to mean.

The project runs from February 2015 for four years and has a budget of € 6.3 million, so it is quite reasonable by comparison to mandating untried solutions for all new buildings. The development is planned in four significant phases.

The first two will focus on taking the materials from idea to application, before emphasis switches to a smooth transition from lab to demonstration scale, facilitating an exploitation of the results by the building industry and key stakeholder groups such as construction professionals, local authorities and architects.