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Extreme Recycling - Cardboard Buildings
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!"
Both my elementary and high school had cardboard walls. It really sucked, unless you liked learning European History in Algebra class.
"Ask me about Loom"
Cardboard buildings: not for the homeless anymore!
And look what happened to the pig who built his house out of sticks when the big bad wolf came by!
Anybody notice the date on the article is 1 April 2000?
How bout we recycle linux into something usefull.
In order to prepare for the coming hunting season, I recycled the Windows2000 manuals, license, and CD that came with my laptop into clay pigeons at the sand pits this month with my rifle.
The cheesy book looked exploded into what looked like a thousand feathers of pages. The license required me to wad it up in a ball to throw it and was a difficult target, but it met its demise.
Only problem was shooting the CD. Kept missing the damn thing. When it did get hit, it would not shatter. Only a tiny hole. Emptied a dozen boxes of shells on the CD alone.
is "01 April 2000"! :)
/. recycle April Fool's day
:)
I wonder why does
jokes (?) as news?
Paul
Turning a hose on your school.
"Attention students, school is cancelled because the classroom has melted."
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
The press release is dated for April 1, 2000. The project is supposed to have been completed by March 2001.
Try browsing through the parent site.
Here is an article from the BBC about it dated March 21, 2001.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I wonder how something such as this would fair in Kansas weather. I doubt it could stand too severe of a straight line wind let alone a tornado. It would have to be a very dry climate to like Arizona. Even with all of the water resistant additives and materials it still couldn't be that water proof. Interesting though.
...are nothing to sniff at, though given the state of some of our schools one has to wonder about the posible motives. Anyway for more info on a broad range of building techniques and other alternative stuff take a look at these guys: Centre for Alternative Technology. They have some rather impressive buildings made from a range of materials. Including a Straw bale theater and a new visitor center made from rammed earth columns.
troodon.net
Check out this page for more interesting info on using cardboard for buildings, including an Expo pavillion!
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Emptied a dozen boxes of shells on the CD alone.
Hmmm, rifle shells are a buck or so apiece... So, congratulations - you managed to spend nearly as much to shoot the CD as Windows2000 cost you.
Using a microwave oven would have been less expensive.
It is suggested you read the article. The building has been treated for both water, and fire, and strength.
The strength tests they used were the following: (1) The strongest man in Great Britain took a sledge hammer to one of the tubes. It was only slightly dented. I'd imagine Lumber acts the same way when he takes a sledge hammer to it. (2) They built a test bridge out of the material, and drove a 1 ton van onto it, which did not dent at all.
The fire test involved taking a flame thrower to untreated and treated cardboard. The untreated burned pretty good, but the treated charred, but remained physically mostly in tact (similar to lumber). Don't expect it to survive burning jet fuel, but it should do okay.
The water test involved the local fire department hosing the place down with fire hoses. The inside remained dry, with no leaks or damp spots.
However, its life is only expected to be 20 years. Which really isn't that bad, for a recycable building.
Now that I think of it, I didn't use enough ammo. If I remember right, I bought those 100 boxes of 10 rounds of SKS ammunition for $100 total.
It may have cost me more to own W2K...
playground whispers of ...screen door on a submarine ... solar powered flashlight ... parachute that opens on impact ... all replaced by
"Did you hear the one about the brits who made a cardboard school ?"
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
"I see you've been sent to the my office for the fourth time this month."
Jimmy continued silently staring at the cardboard floor, kicking impatiently at the corrogated ridges under his feet showing through after three months of moderate traffic.
"Jimmy?"
Jimmy looked up, feigning a look of innocence.
"You know matches, lighters and magnifying glasses were banned after we lost the North wing."
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
can be found at http://www.cardboardschool.co.uk/content/projim01. htm. This includes construction photos and some detail shots of the more interesting parts.
u gust_03.htm picture, showing the front of the completed building.
Of particular interest to the masses is this http://www.cardboardschool.co.uk/content/siteim/A
will all be fire retardant
Come on, it's not "fire retardant" it's "thermally challenged".
Not very PC if you ask me =P
If God gave us curiosity
you know the soundtrack for baldur's gate II? well i am playing the sequel. which really has nothing to do with anything. except: the soundtrack.
/. it might be this soundtrack that compelled me to actually take the notion of a press board school a matter worthy of comment.
the soundtrack plays constantly, really heady sweeping "end-of-the-world"symphonic stuff. plays when you are paused. it was playing when i took a break and decided to check out
there is nothing crazy or edgy about useing processed paper as a building material. i think it's a capitol idea.
...What is CAT's next great innovation?...
You're missing the point of the project, this bunch of hippies that missed out on the 60-70's set out to experiment with various forms of 'alternative' techonology, turning a former slate slag strewn hill into a proof of concept, educating the public that some iffy notion of being 'green' is far from unrealistic and pointless. Their inovation is education. Much of 'their' technology is stuff that has been imported from third world countries which lack the luxury of the wests disposable lifestyle.
troodon.net
In the 50's, France, under the pressure of the baby boom, build schools out of steel and... plaster and other supposed to be non inflammable, to be quickly available and cheap. The so called "Lycées Pailleron". As the building got older, some of the materials degraded and became toxic and inflammable. In 1971, one of the school caught fire. The fire spread so fast that the children had no chances excaping. There were ~100 dead. During the 80's it happened a second time, and some less dangerous accident later, the french goverment decided to destroy the old schools and to build the school in concrete.
Such schools might be cheap building, but in the long run they have heavy maintenance... And might also become dangerous if not permanently monitored.
Make your choice !
So, this is what happens when all the public funds get shelled out for countrywide CCTV video surveillance.
+++ath0
Did anyone else catch the date of that article? Do they observe April Fools day in the UK?
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
The basic truth about building is that walls are cheap. Architectural details cost. Systems (plumbing, electrical, HVAC) cost. Windows cost. But big flat walls are cheap. This is why alternative building systems don't get very far. They address the wrong problem.
But what about the cost of the construction workers? The building materials are usually not the largest cost for the construction of a building. Given this is specialized construction, I am sure the number of construction companies able to build these structures are few and expensive. Would the school district want to pay to have the schools torn down and rebuilt every 20 years?
That's assuming that they last 20 years. What are they doing to resist being damaged due to vandalism? The biggest problem will not be the weather, but juvenille delinquents scarring the external shell causing water to enter and weaken the structure. A Polish friend of mine said that at one time vehicles in his country had bodies made of heavy cardboard/pressboard coated with enamel paint. It was ok until the paint cracked and water seeped in and caused it to rot and smell. He said he once saw a guy get so mad at his rotting car that he put his fists and feet through it and ripped it apart.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
More kids blathering on about the benefits of recycling. "Look Mom, I recycled my juice box! Don't throw away those toilet paper rolls, it's bad for the Earth!"
sulli
RTFJ.
I think that you are American and don't know why people from other countries don't like you. Believe me, it's not because you enjoy freedom that other countries don't have, it's because you call other people morons. Very simple.