About us
Balanced Earth is a Byron Bay, Australia-based sustainable building company and hempcrete specialist. Its 'low impact, carbon negative' building philosophy centres on hempcrete walls — a mixture of locally sourced hemp hurd, mould-resistant lime binder, and water, hand-made by the company's team using tamping techniques and reusable lifting formwork — which it uses in both new architectural homes and as a retrofit and renovation material for existing properties. The company reports that it has successfully retrofitted brick veneer homes (a notoriously poor-performing, hot-in-summer wall type common in Australia) by adding internal hempcrete walls for insulation, directly improving thermal comfort in existing housing stock rather than only in ground-up construction. Balanced Earth's own materials lay out the specific sustainability case for hempcrete in detail: it functions as a whole wall system that can eliminate the need for separate cladding, wall wrap, insulation, plasterboard, paint, skirting, and architraves; it sequesters carbon for the life of the building (the company estimates roughly 5.5 tonnes of carbon locked up in a typical 50m³-hemp home, against roughly 45-50 tonnes of emissions from a conventional wall system, for a net benefit of about 50 tonnes); Australian-accredited hurd-and-lime products have achieved the highest possible bushfire rating (BAL-FZ); a typical 250mm hempcrete wall achieves an R-value of approximately 3.55, versus roughly R-2.5 for standard insulation batts; the natural lime binder deters mould, damp, rodents, and pests; and hempcrete construction eliminates the need for paint, one of the largest sources of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in a home. The company also grew and tested industrial hemp as a crop on a co-founder's own property without irrigation or pesticides, using only organic compost as fertiliser. The three co-founders of Balanced Earth first met while working on the company's first hemp project, Sky Farm, and the company states it has since completed over 40 hemp construction and renovation projects across the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales. The company acknowledges the Arakwal, Minjungbal, and Widjabul Wia-bal peoples of the Bundjalung Nation as Traditional Owners of the land where it works. Balanced Earth maintains Instagram and Facebook profiles.
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