HOW TO BUILD HOUSES AND STRUCTURES FROM TRASH

Home » Home Improvement » Green Living Join Sign in EzineArticles - Expert Authors Sharing Their Best Original Articles Custom Search Search Tony Chiang Basic Author | 1 Article Joined: November 2, 2015 United States Trash to Gold - Turning Recyclable Materials Into Effective Structures By Tony Chiang | Submitted On November 02, 2015 Recommend Article Article Comments Print Article Expert Author Tony Chiang The rotten sewage stench burned within my nostrils while the blazing sun scorched the entire back of my neck. As I entered a compact, ramshackle house no bigger than my living room in America, I felt tiny pin pricks running up the back of my leg. Looking down, I was greeted by hundreds of hungry mosquitoes. "Welcome to Nantou County," my father said, patting me on the back. "You are witnessing rural life before your very own eyes." A little more than a decade has passed since my first visit to Nantou County, Taiwan, but the memory of the devastating town continues to haunt me today, and has fundamentally developed my desires and goals. In America, my family experiences financial difficulties because my father is the sole income earner supporting a cast of four, yet I am blessed to have three meals a day and a safe roof to sleep under. In many rural areas, however, families struggle to afford basic living conditions. Houses are threatened by the slightest wind, and large rainstorms are capable of wiping out entire communities. Living conditions in Nantou's shanty towns are not one of a kind, but exist across the globe. Areas like Brazil, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Nigeria are built upon such weak infrastructure that when disasters occur, entire regions are razed. This happened in Haiti in 2010 when a 7.0 earthquake exposed the substandard housing infrastructure, costing an estimated quarter million lives. Anyone can fall victim to disasters though. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that even in first world countries like the United States, poorly planned and constructed infrastructure can lead to massive damage. During my 2015 summer break, I was exploring this dilemma on the internet and looking for possible solutions. I knew that countries with unstable economies lacked resources and money to create robust infrastructure within a short time frame. I thought to myself, was there possibly a cost-effective way of building houses that could offer reliable protection and shelter to people in economically disadvantaged areas of the world? Equally important to me was whether such a method could be implemented immediately. Many areas of the world demand better living qualities now and cannot afford to wait decades before getting big changes. It was during my research I came across an article by architect Kimberley Mok and discovered the dream of environmentalists, engineers, architects, and shanty town residents: WASTE HOUSES. A waste house is much, much more than what its name makes of it. It's not just a structure assembled from junk and unwanted household items; a waste house is environmentally friendly, energy-saving, cost-efficient, and most importantly, habitable. In her article, Kimberley Mok describes the Brighton Waste House that was designed by architect Duncan Brown and students from the University of Brighton in 2014. Constructed from blast furnace slag, recycled plywood, 20,000 toothbrushes, denim waste, floppy disks, old DVD cases, carpet tiles, and many more unexpected junk, the Brighton Waste House now can be found at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom. Today, the house serves as a laboratory and design studio. Waste houses were scientifically proven to be energy-efficient and cost-saving, but one factor left me uncertain and curious to know more: the durability of waste houses. Are waste houses substantial enough to withstand disasters? With two weeks of summer left, I decided to do something that I've never tried before: start my own independent project. No teachers, no grades, no rules. I wanted to make my very own waste house without assistance from my parents or peers. I organized my independent project into three processes: design, construction, and experimentation. Phase 1: Design I began by hand-drawing a simple 2D blueprint, labeling the different rooms and dimensions of the house. The one-story house consisted of a living room, a master bedroom, a master bathroom, a study room, a laundry room, two bedrooms, a dining room, a guest bathroom, and a kitchen. I then transferred my 2D design onto the 3D design software Sketchup, creating a house that was 101' x 63.5' x 19'.3" that stood on a 1'7" platform. Since this was a waste house I was creating, I chose reasonable materials and colors on Sketchup. Phase 2: Collection and Construction Building a waste house wasn't just putting a pile of trash together and calling it a day. Hours were spent looking through my community's recycling centers, asking neighbors for discarded items, and perusing dumpsters. All that hard work paid off and I returned home a rich man. My collection consisted of empty water bottles, glue sticks, broken school supplies, floss containers, rags, CD cases, detached tubes, food containers, paint bottles, wood boards, floor tiles, and tons of cardboard. Tools of my own included gloves, rulers, a hand saw, scissors, a knife, cutting blades, wood glue, a glue gun, Super Glue, masking tape, duct tape, and a doctor's face mask. Three days were spent constructing the house in my garage. I assembled the base floor with wood boards, chopsticks, lead cases, and stiff plastic tubes. The roof was created by hot-gluing marble floor tiles to cardboard and then attaching them to a triangular support. The other roof was built out of hard plastic trays and binders. To improve the aesthetics of the house, I added can lids, cylindrical corks, mini wood chips, and a grass field in the front. In terms of resemblance to the 3D Sketchup design, the house was fairly accurate. The final product was entirely based on a scale of 36:1 (Sketchup model vs. Actual model). The room arrangements, dimensions, colors, and visuals of the house matched the design. Phase 3: Testing and Experimentation After constructing the waste-house I tested its structural soundness by conducting two tests: an earthquake test and a flood test. I built a shaker table and ran the earthquake test on it. Scaled up, my house could approximately withstand a 7.5 earthquake with relatively no structural damage to the walls, base, and interior of the building. I also ran a flood test by subjecting the house to a scaled 15 inches of rain. Surprisingly, the structure suffered minimal damage with the exception of paint that had torn off due to the excessive water poured upon the exterior. Water did not flow into the interior of the house, nor were there any signs of leakage through the roof and walls. I didn't expect a waste house to carry so much potential, but it did. Not only was its cost efficiency proven by the fact that I spent $0 on this project, but the waste house demonstrated that it was durable, inhabitable, and reliable. Of course, my earthquake test and flood test were amateur, but they nevertheless proved that a building constructed with waste could hold still and offer protection. The thought of shanty town residents living in aesthetic two-story houses in a decade sounds ridiculous, but the idea of them living in simple waste houses within 3 years isn't too far-fetched. What they demand right now is protection, stable infrastructure, and reliable shelter at low costs. Waste houses might just be the way to do that. In the next few years, I plan to expand upon this project by researching waste statistics on a community level to see if full-scale houses could be feasibly constructed. Eventually, I would like to apply my work to economically disadvantaged countries in need of low-cost sustainable housing and proper infrastructure to meet their specific needs. I will be studying civil engineering at the highest possible level to gain the proper tools necessary to expand my current efforts so that we can limit the many avoidable deaths that occur every year, and to give every family what they deserve - a secure, comfortable, and affordable home. Tony Chiang is currently a high school senior planning to major in civil engineering. He intends to study structural and environmental engineering in order to conduct large scale waste house projects in the future. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/expert/Tony_Chiang/2204855 0 Comments | Leave a Comment Did you find this article helpful? Happy Face0 Sad Face0 Viewed 34 times Word count: 1,299 Article Tools EzinePublisher Report this article Cite this article Stay Informed Subscribe to New Article Alerts: Home Improvement: Green-Living Tony Chiang Email Address Subscribe We will never sell or rent your email address. 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