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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.
I prefer paper!!! omg lol ror wtf bbq hahahah
Oh, and by the way, I can just imagine the SLOGAN:
"Cardboard houses: Not just for homeless anymore!"
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
I'd watch where I spilled fluids.
I shudder to think what the smell would be like if a toilet overflows.
_____
Thank you.
Step 1 - Get laid off from job, live in cardboard box on street.
Step 2 - Convince media that this is the future of housing materials.
Step 3 - Profit!
The site says -
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.
So, is that US $35,000 or AU $35,000?
If it's the latter, it's really quite cheap and could be helpful to build cheap, sustainable housing. Hell, I'm an out-door buff and I'd love to buy one of these that can be reused when I go on long treks and climbs.
Sure as hell beats living in a tent for weeks on end.
I can see folks like archaelogists loving this sort of thing - they go on long digs where they'd really need to set shop, and nothing would come close to something like this. Best of all, this provides for an excellent place for storing artifacts and the like and in setting shop.
However, I think that for Joe Regular to buy it, it would perhaps need to be a *little* cheaper - US $5,000 or so.
"Hello, I'd like to order ten plain cheeze pizzas..."
Why didn't this article come out yesterday?
I just took all my cardboard to the recycling center. There was a lot of it too. I could have at least build the first floor.
High society will live in elegant, custom constructed cardboard houses, and people who are down on their luck will be found, living in alleys in shitty brick houses.
Electrons are free; it is moving them that becomes expensive.
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?
People have been living in card board boxes forever.
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
Okay, nice page, but what about fire and pests (ants, wasps etc.)? What about storms? Is it well insulated? It seems to me that it doesn't have real windows, just the plastic cover -- that's definitely a no-no if you're somewhere where it gets cold in winter. Plus, if the composting part of the toilet is mounted below the floor, out in the cold, it will not work in winter.
where's all that Karma?
*cough* that's better. Now, the fact is that down the in (British) West Country, we've been building sustainable housing for years. here's a straw house, for example - alas it fell foul of the planning regs and the local council are insisting it be demolished; but it'll be back up in a day or two.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
and possibly cheaper too...
adobe, a house made out of soil and clay...
(not the software company)
That's how I read it when you say things like that.
You can't take the sky from me...
is in the use of duct tape to hold everything together. It may be hard to heat, but at least it is terrorist-proof!
People in cardboard houses shouldn't throw matches.
Seriously, I don't get this. We've got a reasonable solution for temporary housing, and it's not as wasteful as this. Mobile homes! They are cheaper, last longer, and are easier to setup and/or move. Admitted, a cardboard house is recycled, so we aren't chopping down a small stand of trees to produce it, but can't we re-use cardboard in another fashion? Is there a need to build a home out of cardboard? Overall, it seems like a good idea until bad things happen, and then a cardboard house isn't very appealing. Thieves, arsonists, storms, and the high cost make this unappealing.
-- No sig for you!
How many poor families are paying a lot more than $300 month and still have utility bills that the cardboard house doesn't need? Plenty, I bet. I bet you are too.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Frank Lloyd Wright developed concrete housing that reused wooden forms (the biggest expense).
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http://149849284.home.icq.com/frank%20lloyd%20wri
All steel Lustron housing were another attempt at affordable housing.
http://www.oldhouseweb.com/stories/Detailed/12270
One of the companies I work for built a similar system recently.
We typically build patio sunrooms out of plywood laminate and foam-core insulation (Styrofoam in the middle), but as it turns out, the material also can be used to provide extremely inexpensive housing for Mexicans whose houses were destroyed in an intense storm.
So yes, American corporations are behind such technology. It's very profitable.
Could such a product be used in the united states? No, you're probably correct, such a product would likely not pass building code. It's hard enough to get the patio rooms to pass code in most of Florida, but to prove safety in actually living in the thing would prove impossible.
Houses aren't like tin cans or newspapers. People don't use them once and then toss them away. The cardboard house has an expected lifespan of 20 years. I'd say virtually all conventional houses that were built 20 years ago are still in use, and most will probably still be in use 20 years from now.
If you want to be environmentally friendly, why not build a wood house and keep it for 50 years?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Yes, you can make houses out of almost anything.
Thomas Edison was playing with this idea almost 100 years ago (with concrete prefabricated house shells). The bad news is that a shed is still a shed. Unless you have damp course (to stop water from the soil) you will have serious problems with our friends the fungi. After WWII, in the UK, there was an attempt to rebuild infrastructure using "prefab" houses (mostly asbestos etc). Took a long time to get everyone out of what was supposed to be temporary housing even there in UK. Nice in theory, ugly in practice. Might be fun here in the med where its drier though...
Now, which island do i want my cardboard house on.
(2000+ to choose from)?
Cheers,
Andy Allen
Athens Greece
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.
This would be more appropriate for building a geodesic dome..
..
Using the inherent strength of the dome to compensate for the fact you are using paper
Could still use the same sort of techniques, and be 'portable'.... Plus you get more 'space' for the same amount of material.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It turns out that Polystyrene (aka styrofoam) is also a viable and cost-effective building material, currently being planned for deployment in Afghanistan by the Federation of American Scientists. According to this blog entry, "the New Harmony House (in New Harmony, Indiana) was built using this material as a demonstration, with impressive results (including the house using 50-70 percent less energy than a conventionally-constructed home)."
No, that's a symptom of a tangential problem: give people something, and they don't value it. Easy come, easy go.
The Aussie A-frame fills a niche like the mobile home: a cheap place to buy. Trailer parks are seedy and crimeful too, but nothing like Cabrini Green was.
sigs, as if you care.
Who cares about sledgehammers and pouring water on the outside. Here's some of the things I'd like demonstrated:
1 - Humidity resistance. Place the thing in humid conditions for a few years and let's see if there is any structural weakening or fungal growth. Normal cardboard will rot and absorb water from the air (making it heavier and weakening it structurally) very quickly.
2 - Flood damage. What happens if the thing goes under 1 foot of water. A normal house needs major interior repairs, but remains structurally sound.
3 - Insulation. Done right, cardboard is a decent insulator, and they can always put in extra, but for a house with a 20 year design life, I have a feeling that decent insulation has been omitted. The house also has a very low thermal mass.
4 - Paper Acid. Unless they're using acid-free paper to make the cardboard, the acid will eat and weaken the structure. Judging from how long books printed on paper with acid last, I'd say 20 years should leave the structure weak enough to be condemned. Of course, if they're using hemp cardboard, then they're in the clear (but it might get them into legal trouble).
5 - Wiring. Inverters don't grow on trees and using 12V wiring means much thicker wires will be needed. To provide 12kW of capacity (typical of a modern built house), the wires would have to sustain 1,000 A or current, which would entail some pretty fat wiring as well as precautions to prevent the self-impedence (which is substantial at 1000 amperes) from generating dangerous sparks. You'll also need an inverter for each of your appliances (unless you can find custom built 12V DC ones), and I just cringe at how expensive an inverter for central air conditioning is. Also, if you want to connect to the grid, you'll need a rectifier also capable of handling heavy loads. I really do wonder what they were thinking of using 12V. 12V is good for a boat or a car, but its got no place in a house.
6 - Hurricane and tornado resistance. If you live in hurricane country, I sure hope its tied down well, because that thing looks like it'll blow away being so light and having no foundation. Come to think of it, it probably acts a lot like a mobile home in a hurricane.
7 - Maintenance costs. I would disagree with their rosy outlook. If I have the normal amenities (air conditioning, heat, a computer, TV, telephone, cable), I'll be paying more per month for this house than a well built steel, concrete, or wooden house. High heating and cooling bills because of poor insulation. Unsightly wires because there's no place to hide them. Having to depreciate the thing over 20 years instead of the 100+ that a well built house will last. Hard to resell house, unless these things become very popular, so you'll take a big hit in moving unless you lug the piece of junk with you. If I were to buy a property with such cheap construction, it would be to get to the land, and I wouldn't pay a cent more than the land is worth minus demolition costs.
In Pigeon Cove, near Rockport, Massachusetts starting in 1922, a mechanical engineer named Elis F. Stenman built a house out of tightly rolled, varnished newspaper. He also built furniture for the house including tables, chairs, cabinets, bookcases, a piano, and a grandfather clock.
The front of the grandfather clock incorporates newspapers from the capital cities of each of the (then) forty-eight states, all oriented so that the name of the paper and city neatly face forward and are readable, although the varnish has gotten quite dark with age.
The house survives today. It is just off by itself in on a little nondescript road. There is relatively little publicity. No visitor's area or parking lot, you just park on the street.
I don't think I would travel a great distance to see it, but if I were in the Cape Ann area I certainly would take a look at it. Well worth half-an-hour of anyone's time. You are aware of being in the presence of someone very original who by gosh knew what he wanted to do and did it.
More here and here.
(Oh, and I think the Forest Products Laboratory of Madison, Wisconsin also has or had a demonstration house built out of some kind of cardboard-like material).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
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.
> You make it sound like getting stoned is a bad thing!
:-)
No, but getting burnt is
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.
Uh, "short-term", as in, "until the next time it rains"???
I wondered where all the animals went in that picture.
Wasn't the resolution to this disconnect the "Projects"
Basically, yes. Believing that people really just need a door to lock and place to sleep lead to the rational (but wrong) conclusion that projects would be an efficient solution.
People need a roof over their heads, but even the lockable door is questionable: most people in my NYC apartment don't lock their doors.
Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs have both written about what makes a successful residence, and monolithic blocks of cookie-cutter apartments isn't it. You need a graduation of public to private areas, places for people to gather both as individuals and groups, 24-hour activity in some places, a mix of commericial and residential at all levels, inviting outdoor areas, good public transit, etc.
It's virtual impossible to "fix" a giant low-income apartment building, but here are a few things you could do:
1) Convert 1 apartment per floor into a convenience store. Have long hours, and staff it as much as possible with people from the building. You want people to meet their neighbors, and small stores are a good way to do it. An active store = more foot traffic = less crime.
2) Add day-care centers (1 per 10 floors or so.) A mother with a child can't get a job unless there is someplace to leave her kid now and then.
3) Add a small health clinic. This is cheaper than the hospital's ER.
4) Break up the homogeneity: make a few two-storey rooms. Make these micro-community centers that show movies, host lectures, religious services, birthday parties, etc.
There are hundred more things you could do, but all are concerned with moving from a concrete box full of little locked apartments to a community where people know each other.
This is no different than the skillion other "homes for poor people" sales pitches. So what? We already have habitat for humanity and they're in just about every community in the US. Fact is this is all about nothing but selling shit and putting more people in debt, because people in debt are going to be "more responsible" and feed the machine.
You want to provide people a chance at home ownership, get rid of the bullshit local "building codes" that exist for no other reason than to keep contractors and hardware stores in business. There are homes all over Euroupe, Asia, and the Mideast that have stood for hundreds of years and are made of nothing more than mud. Cob homes, in some parts of the world, are now becoming "fashionable" again and sought by well-to-do who want something with quality and character - attributes long lost to modern construction. But because building a cob home doesn't financially benefit anyone but the nearest dirt farm and an army of unskilled laborers, it's disallowed in just about any non-rural area in the US.
At the other end of the affordable/quality spectrum, you can buy a used trailer home in ths country for just a couple thousand dollars - but most local ordinances won't allow people to put these low cost homes on their own fucking property.
You want to afford poor people the opportunity to own their own homes, give them the freedom to do with their own property as they see fit. Set appropriate national MIMIMUM standards for sanitation and structural integrity and set barriers to local communities mandating higher, purely politically motivated, standards.
Well, 54 now. But I'm not counting (save for the $15K I've put into it- or in that case, not saved).
I live in the snow region which, as of last year, had up to 3 foot deep snow ON MY ROOF. That the house occupies approximately 800 sq foot on the ground, thats about 3000 cubic feet of snow sitting above my head.
No offense to the posters of this article, but... That house is absolutely worthless in my region. But I'm sure that won't stop people from going on and on about how the US is a wasteful society and should model themselves after this... blah blah blah.
Parent is right. A house is a permanent structure and stays that way save for natural disaster, fire, or intentional destruction.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be wandering up onto the roof with another 400 lbs of salt soon- in preparation of the winter.
As environmentally friendly and frankly quite cool as this seems, the current price of $35,000 AUS (~$27,000 USD) seems a little steep for the uses (temporary housing, travel home) they're marketing it for. For that price in the US, you can get a decent trailer or RV that doesn't need to be disassembled to transport and is less likely to get water seepage and mildew when it rains...
If you want true affordable environmentally-sound housing for the poor, the best bet is to go with something like architect Nader Khalili's Superadobe shelter designs. The shelters are made with sandbags reinforced with wire and filled with earth from the site. Not only do these not require costly deliveries of wood and cement products, they can be assembled in a matter of hours and can withstand wind, rain, hurricanes, earthquakes and other natural disasters. They also have a cool "hobbit-hole" type of feel...
Yeah, the Tokyo land value/comparison is accurate, or was. The 'kicker' though, was all the billions and billions in loans that the biggest banks in Japan made, using borrowers' real estate 'value' as collateral.
When the real estate market collapsed (so to speak), the banks hit the tank. They still haven't come fully to terms with the non-performing debt, 15+ years after the fact.
A lot of the folks borrowed money to buy more real estate in Japan, Hawaii and the continental US, driving prices higher in those markets also, but those markets held steady. Yet when the Japanese market tanked, borrowers had no choice but to sell freshly-bought and/or developed property in the US, under 'duress'. (to satisfy a banking version of a 'margin call' when the loan/collateral ratio had become too skewed). When the 'now-nearly-worthless' is forcing sales, the 'sales' are of worthy items, but the mass sale of those items leads to their collective prices dropping, like dominoes. That's a classic 'crash'.
A friend picked up a hotel on Maui, for 12 million cash, that had been built one year previously... with 185 million in 'borrowed' cash... ouch. If you see a Japanese dude in one of these cardboard boxes, who knows, it might be a former real estate 'Baron'.
Amen.
I think the key here is the "responsibility" issue. Just because you don't have a government agency looking out for you doesn't mean that we are gonna have thousands of people handing over money without thinking. The reason slum lords can get away with what they get away with, is because people have come to expect something from houses. They expect the government agency, and it's rules, to be able to prevent them from getting ripped off. They know of the existence of this agency, and of it's rules (how could you NOT, with how restrictive they can be) and they say "Well, if my buddy had so many problems with that upgrade that even I thought to be fairly safe because it wasn't up to code, it must be nearly impossible to get away with anything genuinely unsafe, or poor in quality." They are re-assured by the fact that this government agency "runs things". If you did away with this government agency, all of a sudden, the responsibility of checking up on a house that you bought/rented would fall solely on YOU. You're the one investing the money in it, therefore, it would be in YOUR best interests to check it out, get a friend to check it out, hire a local handyman to check it out etc.
I think the problem is that people are scared of the responsibility. When they have this big government body reassuring them that they will be okay, they feel totally abdicated of any responsiblity. They get fucked, and it's not THEIR problem, they can just shift the blame over to someone else.
You want to talk about thousands of deaths from houses that wouldn't survive an earthquake? Gee, living in a house that isn't earthquake proof in an earthquake prone area? Hmmm... Called survival of the fittest last time i checked. If you want to argue that millions of idiots would go out and buy lethal/unsafe houses if we didn't have a government agency, then sure, i'll say that might even be true. Does that mean we need to pat these idiots on the head, and lead them off in the direction of something safe? Not necessarily. I think we should leave these idiots to their own devices, and 20-40 years down the road, we might have a slightly higher quality of gene pool.
Government agencies don't need to tell smart people what to do, they tell stupid people what NOT to do.
The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has some interesting designs using waterproofed paper tubes - they are really beautiful. See Paper Architecture, A Case Study: Cardboard Shelters, Kobe Earthquake January 1995, Time's Innovators article on him, and a Google Images search of his work