Prefabricating Green:
Building Environmentally Friendly Houses Off Site

On paper, prefabricated housing has the potential to offer significant environmental benefits: stronger, better-insulated structure; less waste from construction; reduced transportation impacts from travel to the building site; and, in some cases, easier disassembly for reuse or recycling. In addition, the efficiency of factory production has the potential to lead to cost savings that would make prefabrication a good fit for greening affordable housing. However, the industry has been slow to adopt high-performance building practices, meaning that the full environmental...