To understand Enviro-Ment you have to understand traditional building. For over 6000 years, sustainable buildings (structures whose life spans over centuries and millennia) have been built by tying multiple wythes (or skins) of masonry units together. These masonry units may have been brick, marble, limestone, rubble stone, or combinations of two or more of these. The glue (mortar) that held these structures together was nearly always lime. Flexible, accommodating, breathable, and abundantly found in nature, lime mixed with sand provided the perfect material for these solid masonry walls. Anything softer and the work might not stand.  Anything harder and the masonry might crack and fail.

We see this material in action everyday. Whether it's the Coliseum in Rome, or the Tower of London, or the Louvre, or the White House, this perfect material has stood the test of time. However, over the past 200 years we have seen building construction shift from these walls built to perform to thinner walls utilizing harder materials that offer no better, and many times worse performance. At Virginia Lime Works, we have studied these buildings that work and are taking those principles forward in a new, exciting way.