‘Plastic Roads' Are Paved With Good Intention

A warehouse in Switzerland is being transformed into new creative workspaces. The catch: It’s being constructed out of reused building materials. About 70 percent of it is being made from old materials like wood floorboards, steel beams, and windows. A network of treasure hunters are on the lookout for used materials that can be used in constructing these buildings. The workspace is nearly complete and it already has tenants for all of the spaces. They were also able to cut the building’s carbon emissions in half.

Hempcrete, a combination of hemp, water, and lime, can be used as a more sustainable insulation option for buildings. The material improves energy efficiency, produces less carbon than options like fiberglass and foam, and will continue to capture carbon while used as insulation.

The Brock Commons Tallwood House in Canada was the tallest building made of wood when it opened in 2017. Now, thanks to government policies, scientific research, and hundreds of examples of proof-of-concept, more developers around the world are looking to construct buildings out of timber. Using timber is cheaper than cement, concrete, and steel and can actually store carbon emissions in its supports instead of releasing the greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

Even with such increasingly popular trends as reusable grocery bags and biodegradable food containers, 70% of plastic products end up in landfills; but with the help of a local start-up, MacRebur, several townships in Scotland are cutting back on this quantity while simultaneously servicing and improving the quality of their transportation networks.

The use of plastic waste as an affordable building material is rising in popularity. One option is turning the waste into “Ecobricks” by tightly packing it into a bottle with a stick. A German organization called Project Wings pays locals in Bukit Lawang, Indonesia, to collect plastic and make bricks to be used for buildings.

QuadLoop is a Nigerian business that produces solar lamps from recycled electronic parts like lithium batteries and screens. This practice makes the lamps more cost-effective and reduces electronic waste.

Eastern Washington University recently built the first tall wood office building in the state joining hundreds of other large “mass-timber” projects in the United States. This growing industry constructs panels, beams, and columns from trees that need to be thinned to curb wildfires in forests. While wood buildings can be more expensive to build than ones constructed from concrete and steel, environmentalists are on board because wood can store carbon, which can help offset greenhouse gas emissions.

A civil engineer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia is converting biosolids, or disinfected leftovers from the water treatment process, into bricks for building. He claims they look, smell, and work the same as conventional fired clay bricks, but with an added benefit of saving land and energy and reducing carbon emissions.

To rebuild Gaza, Green Cake manufactures construction blocks out of locally-available ash and rubble. It’s a low-cost and reliable alternative to importing supplies from Israel.

Renovating and furnishing a home can be hugely expensive. Homeowners who are renovating on a budget, and want to do so in a way that is evironmentally friendly, can find recycled luxury kitchens and other lightly used fixtures at stores like Green Demolitions.