Tapping into Urban Recycling for Low-Cost Building Materials: Exploring a Craft/Digital-Based Workflow for a Building System with Waste Cardboard and Wood.
Waste corrugated cardboard is one of the most significant components of urban solid waste worldwide. It is also among the least valued recyclable goods found in any given urban waste stream today, and it is highly underutilized in developing countries. Although recycling rates of waste cardboard reached decade-high levels in recent years—including in the United States—both the price per ton and the amount of waste cardboard exported for recycling dropped substantially, resulting in more of this material being sent to landfills. Some of the essential benefits of cardboard as a building material demonstrated by previous research include recyclability, relative strength to support certain structural loads, lightweight, and beneficial acoustic and thermal insulation characteristics. The work presented in this dissertation aims to take advantage of the low-cost, availability, and material properties inherent in cardboard to devise a workflow to produce affordable building components and support low-cost/low-skilled housing construction. The research combines low-tech and low-skilled methods with high-tech and computational design methods and tools to design and prototype building components for housing construction produced with sheets of waste cardboard and wooden elements. The research contributions include increasing buildings’ sustainability by reusing waste cardboard instead of landfilling it and helping waste collectors’ communities in developing countries to add value to the material they collect.
Project Link
http://personal.psu.edu/jcd40
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