Check out how this guy is building eco tiny houses for people in need while recycling tons of waste plastic.
Eco-entrepreneur, Oscar Andres Mendez Gerardino, is an award-winning innovator who founded his company, Conceptos Plasticos, to provide war refugees on the Pacific coast of Columbia with inexpensive, sustainable housing. In the process, he might have set a domino-effect in motion that could change the future of sustainable architecture forever. How? Basically, with giant lego bricks.
Oscar invented a process of molding plastic into durable, uniform components that can be used as a modular building material. The pieces are largely interchangeable, and because they fit together with minimal use of hardware or glue, structures can even be designed for portability.
His novel manufacturing method exploits the malleability of plastic, along with its extreme durability. It can take as long as 500 years for sunlight to break down plastic, and even then it has a colossal negative impact on worldwide aquatic ecosystems. Unfortunately, contemporary recycling isn’t much help with the problem, because many products made with recycled plastic are inferior in quality to their newly-made counterparts, in addition to often being more expensive to manufacture.
What makes Oscar’s blocks different is that they can be made cheaply without high levels of processing or the resulting pollution, and in some ways they actually surpass the functionality of similar materials currently in use. As a bonus, they can be made with less carbon output than Portland cement, steel and many other traditional industrial construction materials. The best part is the bricks are made with a category of waste plastic that, until now, has been all but impossible to recycle. When used in this application, the fact that the plastic can last 500 years with no maintenance is a huge bonus. They’re also a superb alternative to compressed earth blocks in wet climates, or in areas where clay soil is hard to come by.
Over the past five years or so, Conceptos Plasticos has recycled more than 300 tons of post-industrial and post-consumer plastics to build more than 1,500 square meters of living space. In 2016 alone, they expect to build 240 new homes. By 2018, they plan to scale their production up to 600 tiny houses a year. (Given that Conceptos Plasticos is a fledgling company trying to shift several worldwide paradigms, I’d call this pretty outstanding.) The secret to their success is the modular design of Oscar’s bricks – a four person team can finish a 360 square foot tiny house in as little as five days.
For now, it’s too early to tell how Conceptos Plasticos and their recycled plastic bricks might change the world, but if I were going to invest in a start-up business based on sustainable tiny house construction in the United States, this is definitely the place I would start. The base materials are dirt cheap and easy to come by, the construction process is exceptionally simple, quick, and easy to train contractors to do, and you’ll be helping the future generations of our planet in a profound way. I’d love to see sustainable tiny house communities made of recycled plastic all over the world. With the help of Oscar’s new technology, this dream may not be so farfetched.
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