Over the years, more homeowners have embraced sustainable living by choosing environmentally friendly materials for building and renovating their homes, recognising the growing importance of these choices. Choosing eco-friendly building supplies has many benefits such as assisting with reducing environmental footprint and improving the comfort and value of your home. At Swartland, we take pride in using natural resources responsibly, ensuring that our products contribute to a sustainable future.

Swartland offers a range of eco-friendly products designed to help homeowners build or renovate with sustainability in mind. With our responsibly sourced timber and energy-efficient products, we make it easy to create a greener and more comfortable home.

Why Sustainable Choices Matter for Your Home

Traditional building materials

Using traditional building materials in home construction and renovation can result in long term consequences, as these materials often contribute to deforestation, high energy consumption and excessive waste. This leads to a larger carbon footprint and depletion of natural resources. Over time, this can worsen climate change, reduce biodiversity and ultimately strain ecosystems as a whole.

Legal and financial risks

Additionally, there are the risks of legal and financial consequences to consider, such as the NBRBS and GBCSA standards. As regulations around sustainability have improved, homeowners and builders may face penalties or higher costs for not abiding to eco-friendly standards. 

According to the Green Building Council South Africa (GBCSA) and the National Building Regulations and Building Standards (NBRBS), it’s important to ensure that your building reduces energy consumption in line with EDGE or SANS 10400-XA guidelines. These standards also emphasise on reducing pollution from energy generation, particularly greenhouse gas emissions, which can be achieved by utilising renewable energy sources, such as solar power.

Homes built with non-sustainable materials may also require more maintenance and have higher energy costs, ultimately reducing their value. These maintenance costs include:

• Poor Insulation leading to higher energy bills.
• Durability issues with low quality materials.
• Increased moisture and mould problems.
• Outdated HVAC (Heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems.
• Reduced property appeal.