I paid $1.67/cf for reclaimed XPS. Blown cellulose is about 80 cents a foot. So what? Green isn't reaching the people who need it because the focus is on products rather than policy. A fourplex owner could save his tenants a ton of money for an outlay of $1.500 if there were any reason to do it. Elsewhere, governments are trying to come up with that reason. In the US, green is little more than products or services to be sold, usually to new home buyers, with government support. Tax credits are the only politically acceptable answer for the second even though half of filers pay no taxes to claim a credit against. And those people would again be the people who need green most.
France required home sellers to show buyers a Diagnostic de Performance Energétique beginning in 2006. It set a target of 400,000 renovations per year and offered sales tax abatements and zero-interest loans. The UK imposed similar disclosure rules in 2007 and began a program of subsidizing retrofits for poor Britons. Of course Europe uses taxes to keep fuel prices high enough to warrant thrift. I don't mean this as a political rant. One hopes people would recognize which approach makes more sense
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