New year, new home. And it's green!

You may have heard in WoW! News before about ways that we can make our homes more environmentally friendly - using insulation to save heat, say. But that's once we're living in them. Did you know that about 13% of all the man-made carbon dioxide (CO2) that goes into the atmosphere every year comes from building new homes, schools, offices and so on?

Why so dirty?

That's because the industrial processes to make building materials like concrete burn lots of CO2-producing energy and also give off CO2 as part of the chemistry of creating them. Then there's all the transport, in ships and trucks, to get these heavy materials from factories to wherever the building sites are. There/s also a lot of waste on building sites, with materials thrown away without being used.

Gregory's "footprint"

WoW! News went to visit Gregory in western France. His company and others involved in the construction business have got together on a project they call Empreinte, or Footprint, in French. Its goal? To reduce their industry's carbon footprint - the amount of CO2 they emit to build houses. They've done some really radical things to reinvent how builders work, cut down on waste, on transport and so on. They've worked out ways to use recycled plastic bottles and local, natural materials like clay. And if you head over to the WoW! News app, you can see their most dramatic innovation - a house that's literally printed out in 3D...