concrete alternatives

Aside from shipping containers, people are continually finding other eco-friendly alternatives in building houses.  With all that has been happening-- extreme changes in the weather, earthquakes, tsunamis, oil shortage, I think there's an increased awareness in everyone about the dismal state of our planet.

Ever seen the movie Back to the Future?  There's a scene where Doc arrives in his DeLorean and he's running low on fuel, but instead of filling it up with gas, he fills it with trash.  A car running on garbage-- that's pure genius.  Well, we may not have that yet (this looks bogus) but people are looking into using garbage for building houses.  The use of plastic as an aggregate for cement is one of the alternatives for concrete.  One of the cities here in the Manila have bought a pulverizing machine to try this out.  Another company in Massachusetts, Conigliaro Industries, already have several projects made with their Plas-Crete.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="250" caption="salt building, http://www.conigliaro.com"][/caption]Aside from plastic, other waste products can be used as fillers.  GigaCrete™, the brainchild of British architect Andrew Dennis, uses waste paper, recycled cardboard, recycled polystyrene, agricultural waste fibers, and paper sludge as fillers.  About 80% (by volume) of GigaCrete™ products can be composed of these waste materials.

Bitublock, from Dr. John Forth of the University of Leeds, is not yet market ready but it has potential. It's also made from waste products like recycled glass, metal slag, sewage sludge and incinerator ash.  These are mixed with bitumen, a sticky binder used in road paving. The end result, is a "high-performance product that is about six times stronger than the traditional concrete block".

There's a lot of promise in all these efforts.  One thing though, from some of the comments I've read, there are still some people that would rather spend their money on something that's been proven to last-- and proven to be safe.  They may think it's great that we're doing all these for the environment, but there's still some hesitation on using these products.  I hate to end this negatively but I've been trying to search for a high-profile project that uses these materials and I wasn't able to find any.  I don't know, I guess it's all relatively new and it may take some time to catch on.


Sources:
http://www.americanrecycler.com/07used02.html
http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/11/15/bitublock-concrete-will-be-obsolete/
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/06/gigacrete_an_al.php
http://www.conigliaro.com
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/09/21/plastic-concrete-repurposes-landfill-waste-into-building-bricks/#