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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'd watch where I spilled fluids.
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!
I wondered where all the animals went in that picture.
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.
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.
Keep fighting. Straw bale is the housing material of the future far more so than cardboard. Here in Ontario, Canada, even with extremes of temperature and humidity, it's more acceptable every year, as each zoning district sees other places ok'ing it. From what I understand, millions of tons of straw are burnt as waste every year.
In fact, not far from here stands what is thought to be the largest load-bearing straw bale structure in North America, the Robins' Nest Retreat, and even closer is the straw bale home built by Chris Magwood of Camel's Back Construction. With Peter Mack, Magwood wrote Straw Bale Building, which is definitive, thorough, and recommended. (Magwood, incidentally, is off the grid.)
Of course, authorities are more likely to accept structures that are thought to be permanent and safe. (For example, a post-and-beam structure with straw bale infill is a known quantity in this area.) I would worry that tearing a house down quickly only proves that... it can be torn down quickly. Good luck.
And oh yeah, before someone asks: tests by the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation show that a properly built straw bale wall has a two hour fire rating - twice that required of conventional construction.
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.