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Extreme Recycling - Cardboard Buildings

Posted by michael on from the cut-along-the-dotted-line dept.

Xenographic writes: "Apparently, someone in the UK got the idea to build a school entirely out of cardboard and Westborough Primary School decided to implement it. The students are even recycling their trash to help construction!"

2 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Cardboard and the food chain by dattaway · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Using cardboard for structure in a building reminds me of the stuff packed in boxes last springtime during the flood. Water has an affinity to cardboard, soon to be followed by fungus (the fungus is among us,) cockroaches, rats, etc...

    Cardboard is a great way to recycle and support lower life forms.

  2. I'm surprised at how narrowminded /. readers are. by salsbury · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I've got my threading set to drop all the 'anonymous coward' posts, and yet *still* I see 80%-90% of the replies to this story being nothing but crude jokes about melting rooms, arson, and the Three Little Pigs.

    You guys call yourself forward thinking? Sure, if it was something about TiVo, or the latest Quake knockoff, I'm sure you'd be all over it, but try to stretch your minds a little.

    Yes, it's cardboard. And as I seem to have to point out to every single person who makes a rudimentary crack about cardboard melting when it gets wet: Milk cartons are made out of cardboard. They hold liquid for weeks at a time! This is not rocket science, people. It's design science.

    I have been looking at cardboard as a building material since about 1990. It works. It's cheap. It can be made to withstand many of the stresses of the environment. (My design professor, Harold Cohen, built untreated cardboard domes in the 1960's that sat out for a year in the rain and snow of Southern Illinois. They didn't melt. They worked just fine.)

    I've worked with friends to design low-cost emergency shelters for disaster relief and the homeless. And just like all of you, most of them couldn't get past the idea of cardboard melting. So I went with a corrugated plastic material, made just like cardboard, but made from milk-bottle HDPE type-2 plastic. Totally recyclable, and totally waterproof. (Once again, designed to hold milk for weeks, just like the cardboard cartons. :-) ) You can find images of the dome-building party we held at my house in 1998 here and can see some of the results. This dome was about 12' in diameter and 5' high at the center. It was a 1/2 to 1/3 scale model of what we'd deploy to disaster victims or the homeless. The total cost of materials was about US $50.

    Standard building materials for housing cost about US $110 per square foot of area covered. This corrugated plastic drops the price down to US $0.50-$1.00 per square foot covered. If you use cardboard, that price falls another order of magnitude to about US $0.05-$0.10 per square foot covered. So you see, it's not just eco-friendly, and it's not just recyclable. It's also up to 1100 times cheaper than doing it the old-fashioned way. So even if it did wear out after 3 months, as one pundit wrote in these comments, you could keep replacing the building for about 400 years for the same cost. Which is far more than a standard school will last.

    -Pat