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Build a House Out of Recycled Cardboard
Uosdwis writes "Well for a better environmental option to a new house that is affordable, "low cost". Australia architects Stutchbury and Pape have created a house out of recycled cardboard, Velcro, nylon wing nuts and tape. Also , most of the house is recyclable too. It can be built in six hours by two people and can be transportable in a light commercial vehicle. Viva homeownership!" We had a story a few years about a school built out of cardboard.
Seriously, for those of you who don't RTFA, You could live in one while your permanent house is being built or renovated, for emergency housing, or for short-term accommodation. That's about what it looks like, too. You wouldn't spend the rest of your life in one of these.
But the real question is, how much does this MacGyver house cost? At a purchase price of just $35,000 this is a genuine short-term housing option that could be used in a variety of applications. It is lightweight, transportable, requires no more skill to erect than an Ikea product, and is very affordable. That's about $27,000 US dollars.
Nice concept. Wake me when they're mass-produced.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Well.. I assume this is very similar to the building mentioned in a previous slashdot story, which has a comment containing the following:
"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."
Seems pretty damn durable for a cardboard building. Cheap, relatively long lasting (for the material), environmentally friendly, these things would be cool to live in, although I can almost guarantee they won't take off.
Frank Lloyd Wright developed concrete housing that reused wooden forms (the biggest expense).
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All steel Lustron housing were another attempt at affordable housing.
http://www.oldhouseweb.com/stories/Detailed/12270
Actually $35,000 AU is not that cheep. I brand new 4 bedroom single story traditional home is only about $60,000 AU. The real cost is in the land. A block 30metres * 15meters (100ft * 50ft) in Sydney's West is about $350,000 AU.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Cardboard is a solid fiber material, used for thin boxes (think, toothpaste tube box) and tablet backings. Corrugated is the proper term for the material with flat sheets separated by fluted sheets.
As far as waterproofing, it's actually quite economical to make corrugated products completely waterproof. Just last monnth I was at the TAPPI/AICC SuperCorrExpo in Atlanta. That's the every-4-years trade show for corrugated machinery. The booth across the aisle from one of mine had a laminating machine which can coat paper with polyurethane. They had a little waterfall display which showed how resistant the board was. http://www.kohlercoating.com/
There was a similar display in another booth but their sample was only coating the outer surface, not all surfaces during the corrugating process. Similar methods are used to ship some delicate vegetables packed in ice to grocery stores.
We have a patent on a metering machine which allows cold adhesives to be used during the corrugating process. All other methods use large amounts of heat and steam to soften the paper and get the glue (cornstarch) to stick. The "normal" method reduces the strength of the board. We've done experiments with our machine to use multiple layers of medium (the wavy paper in the middle) and various cold adhesives which result in corrugated board almost as strong as solid wood. It was so strong traditional knives in converting machinery could not cut it.
When we did those experiments years ago I wondered about the market for "disposable" housing. The design shown in this article is hideously awkward. I was thinking more about single-level block-type housing which could be made from standardized flat pieces of our super-strong board. Throw in the full waterproofing I've mentioned above and you'd have pretty good pre-fab with strength and environmental resistance somewhere between wood and steel with a fraction of the weight. I'd envisioned something sort of like the flat pieces of a gingerbread house. The edges could even be made notched to hold the boards in place while some form of glue and reinforcement could be used to join the boards.
Having said all of that, corrugated steel is highly transportable and darn strong. It would be as easily worked by hand but it's more durable than any wood-based product.
The sample shown in the article is a joke. There's no way to economically treat corrugated after it's made. You could immerse it in polymers and take care to force it through all the flute spaces but it will still have huge structural weaknesses and be vulnerable to water. The vast majority of paper fibers used to make corrugated and non-print-surface cardboard outside the U.S. use recycled fibers which are shorter than virgin and very weak. Recycling paper breaks the fibers down. Strength of paper comes from multiple adhesions of fibers and proper adhesive. Recycled board is just not suited for something like housing.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
A composting toilet system produces nutrient-rich water for gardening.
the chinese used human faeces in the past, this is known as 'night soil'.
although nutrient-rich, it has a very dangereous counterside: is spreads diseases. human bacils get on crops eaten by humans.. generally this is not a good idea.i would have prefered some methane reactor that provides in heating and/or electricity.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
Logically, 1-4 can be solved by using a different compound to bind the cardboard (eg; polymers/plastics) together, down to the paper fibers themselves.
Electricity would be more expensive, but heating/air conditioning would not. Cardboard is actually a very good insulator, all things considered. That's why homeless "early cardboard housing adopters" in America prefer cardboard refrigerator boxes to many of the alternative living options available.
However, what I believe is the issue, is to create a form of moderate term housing at a minimal cost. I don't think the designers came up with this concept to create housing that someone could live in for a lifetime. It's intended as an alternative to living in a tent after a recent disaster, and to provide a sturdy shelter for larger families than a tent could conveniently provide.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
What's wrong with those building codes?
In the first case, the code was probably a little too strict, though, if I were buying the house, I'd see the PVC as a negative against the house. Your repair guy should have done it right, even if it meant doing it twice. (The quick fix followed by the real fix.)
In the second case, the general rule is probably to replace old fuses with breaker boxes. That's the new code. If the quick fix works and is safe, that's fine. However, in the larger scheme, the codes help maintain standards of safety uniformly across houses. This makes it safer to buy a house for the average person.
BTW - you should have had the cheaper guy install breakers for all circuits.
My main gripe with codes is the cost of inspection. They can add up. I generally have relatively few gripes with the codes themselves, and they aren't that hard to understand or follow.
Out here, in Los Angeles, the cost of housing increases mainly due to lack of supply and growing demand. Permitting is a significant barrier to development that could alleviate shortages. Cities need to be able to give a firm "yes" or "no" decision that holds. Too often, they try to sneak development in on people, and residents object, causing snafus.