Auroville Sustainability

    The community of Auroville was created with a mission to create a community that would integrate social, spiritual and environmental concerns in its growth. Through this Auroville has become a community that is a great environment for innovation and design. This has been the pushing force behind many initiatives of Auroville such as the Solar Kitchen, the Verite green living community, and the Upasana Small Steps bag project. These are all sustainable living practices that Auroville is embracing as a whole throughout their many projects.
    The Solar Kitchen is a culmination of the desire for a sustainable eating facility which is also largely communal.  It was built in 1997 and now serves a total of about 1000 lunches a day in the dining hall as well as sending out lunches to schools and individuals. The Solar Kitchen power system is a hybrid system of diesel and solar with the diesel taking the place of the solar energy production when the generation is too low to support the kitchen operations. The solar component is a bowl which uses hundreds of mirrors to focus sunlight into the heat receiver. There are coils around the heat receiver that are filled with water and then heat up and produce steam which is ten pumped into the boiler room which is below. The menu of the Solar Kitchen is all vegetarian and made largely with organically grown fruits and vegetables that are farmed around Auroville. On top of the 300 meals that are eaten in the Dining Room the kitchen also feeds about 300 people in the outlying communities who provide their own tiffen which the Solar Kitchen then fills with food. The kitchen then also delivers about 540 meals to the various Auroville schools and service centers.

Verite is a small community in Auroville which has adopted the ideas of living simply in all aspects of life and work. The living quarters are made mainly of earth blocks and are small and close together with communal bathrooms and showers. Water is drawn from the ground using a wind-pump and rainwater is collected by the community for agricultural usage. There is also a large communal garden with herbs and vegetables and an orchard with both native and nonnative trees.  The wastewater then cleans both black and grey water and uses that for irrigation for the garden and orchard. The waste from the communal kitchen is composed and also used for fertilizing the orchard and garden.

Another facet of Auroville is the non-profit that works along side called Upasana which comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “sitting near”. It was started in 1997 as a design studio that would bring traditional India handicrafts to the world. Along with many projects that have been aimed at helping village communities such as the Varanasi Weavers project that hepled to being back the weaving craft from that region that was slowly disappearing, they also take part in a sustainability project called “Small-Steps”. The aim of Small-Steps is to help eliminate the use of plastic bags thoughout India and the world. Because of India’s other social problems, the importance of recycling plastic bags has not caught on. This is normally because people simply do not understand the harm that this plastic can cause and then if they do India lacks the recycling resources to deal with the sheer number of plastic bags and other plastic items that simply get discarded on the side of the road and in landfills. Because of this Small-Steps has become a program that produces a cloth alternative to the plastic bags that can be used over and over again.

Along with Small-Steps, the Tsunamika project that Upsasna also started has effects both socially and environmentally. The raw material used to make the dolls is from industrial waste and they are made by fisher women as a way of trauma counseling after the Tsunami in 2004 that hit South Eastern India. So through this project there are both a recycling and waste awareness aspect along with bringing in the social aspects of therapy and also employment for the fisher women who were effected by the Tsunami.

Auroville has made many steps in trying to create and foster within its community a sense of responsibility towards the environment and sustainability. This has paved the way for many projects that have been seen as examples for other communities as a way to integrate everyday life with sustainable living practices.

   

Auroville Earth Institute

On our trip to Auroville outside of Pondicherry we visited the Auroville Earth Institute. The institute was founded in 1989 by the Housing and Urban Development Corporation and Government of India and its main focus is in researching, developing, promoting and transferring soil based building technologies that are both cost and energy effective. The Earth Institute then uses these technologies and conducts seminars and workshops to educate the public along with creating manuals and documents for distribution. This is all to meet their goal of giving people the opportunity to create and build their own homes using earth techniques based mainly on Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks. Because of all of that they have accomplished in promoting earthen building materials, the Auroville Earth Institute is currently the Asia representative of the UNESCO Chair Earthen Architecture Constructive Cultures and Sustainable Development. They are also a part of the world network of CRATerre (the International Centre for Earth Construction), a few NGO’s and the BASIN South Asia- Regional Knowledge Platform.
    The main building materials that the Auroville Earth Institute promotes are Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks. These are blocks that are made with local soil to the area that they will be used in and are not fired, but compressed instead. Through the use of a press that was designed and are now being built at the Earth Institute, the blocks are pressed with a pressure of about 16 tons. Through this process about 1000 blocks can be produced per day, which makes it good for villages and small communities since they can all use the same one, even when building various structures. Because the materials used are local and very available, since it is just soil, this building material is both very cost effective as well as environmentally sustainable. Along with this, since the blocks are all made in a press, they are all the same size which is better for building and the press is mobile so can move throughout an area. The Earth Institute has also developed alternative stabilizers (a mix of milk of lime and alum) and water proofing (different soils, sands, lime, alum and local juices) to cement. Though this would be ideal, there are some cases when cement becomes necessary. In these instances the Earth Institute has developed a type of ferrocement which contains no more than 5% cement for things such as foundations and walls. On our tour of the facilities in Auroville we saw examples of all of the building materials as well as a wall of soils from all over the world. These were samples that had been sent to the Earth Institute by people who wanted them to be tested to see what kind of make up they had to find out what kind of blocks would be created from them if they were pressed into Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks.
    The Auroville Earth Institute is involved with many projects, but I think one of the most interesting is the Disaster Resistant Constructions research. Since 1995 they have been developing a system based on the ferrocement blocks with the Compressed Stabilized Earth Blocks that are hollow interlocking. For the interlocking blocks two different types have been developed for the disaster resistant constructions, on that is square and hollow which allows for a building to become 2-3 floors high and rectangular hollow blocks to be used only for the ground floors. These blocks are then reinforced at critical points with the reinforced cement concrete.   
    All of these are new materials and technologies are Auroville’s attempt at sustainable development. Through their integration of alternative building processes, technologies and renewable energy sources they are hoping to promote green and sustainable living and construction. This fits in with the mission of Auroville as a whole to live in harmony with nature and in reaching human unity. Though researching these building materials further Auroville is hoping to further awareness throughout the world so as to increase the use of these techniques in the developing world.