An Architect Is Building Cottages, Toilets & Bunkers With a 100% Recyclable Material

Have you ever seen a house being transported from one place to another? Yes, like a complete house.  

Me neither, until Moon Bhandari (38) sent me this picture. 

It’s her farmhouse in Nagpur being shipped from the assembly site to the final location. And I must admit it’s a sight to behold. 

Moon and her family had the home built last year, and they’ve spent a few vacations here. Sharing their insistence during the prefabrication stages that the farmhouse be built sustainably, Moon says, “The material that’s been used is very unique, and it doesn’t harm the environment.”

She is referring to the silica composite blocks that architect Shridhar Rao (49) of the Gurugram-based ‘R+D Studio’ calls “a game changer in sustainable construction”. The blocks are 100 percent recyclable, he says, adding that they are 80 percent foundry dust (burned sand from metal casting) and 20 percent plastic waste.

How ‘waste’ becomes building material

While the farmhouse is one example of such a project built using the blocks, a series of 10 toilets in Punjab has also been constructed with them. The first of these was at the Amritsar international airport; Shridhar says the idea was sparked when a student, Ruhani Verma, noticed that the public parking space did not have public utilities and started a movement to have these built. 

“That’s when we got together and proposed the idea of a toilet that would be 100 percent green,” Shridhar shares. 

As Ruhani had shared at the time, “I stay in a boarding school, and we [students] order a lot of parcels from e-commerce sites. So there’s a lot of plastic waste that is generated right here. I spoke to the bhaiyas(sanitation workers) and found a way to segregate the plastic waste and send it to the R+D Studio team’s work site, where the bricks were being manufactured.”

Soon, JK Cement commissioned many more of these toilets. 

With the idea of new locations, there was conversation around a ‘lift and shift’ model, wherein the toilet would be constructed at the factory and then moved to the location. Shridhar gives full credit to the material’s versatility for making all of this possible. “Even today, we are still discovering new properties of this material,” he says. 

A sustainable composite material 

How do the silica composite blocks weather different climates? 

We turn our gaze to a bunker at 14,000 ft near Jammu and Kashmir’s Razdan Pass, where they brave 25 feet of snowfall and bullet threats. Sharing that the walls are strengthened with compacted earth, Shridhar says this insulates the interiors and makes the structure “impenetrable”. 

He explains, “The material is the first barrier to extreme weather. There’s a marked difference in the temperature between the outside and the inside space when you walk into an enclosure that’s built with the silica composite blocks — a minimum five-degree difference.”

While it comes with many advantages, Shridhar’s favourite property of the material is that it can be recycled. 

He recalls that when he set out to develop the material in 2017, he wanted to look beyond ABS plastic (plastic known for high-impact stiffness and toughness; examples are water bottles, LEGO blocks, etc). 

“Single-layer plastic is the thin transparent plastic bags we get from vegetable vendors, and the multilayered plastic is the food chips and biscuit packets. Since these are both input materials in shredded form, with different properties, we use an alternative recyclable additive to stabilise the mix for better results.”

He adds, “During the testing phase, we noticed that even if we threw the blocks from a height of 100 feet, they did not break.” He attributes this strength to the foundry dust, adding, “This means that even the cottages built out of the material will last longer than traditional brick-and-mortar structures.”

Built to take impact and stay intact

Pointing out another uniqueness of the material, he says, “While it performs like stone, it isn’t as brittle in nature.” The architect urges us to think of the material as resembling rubber in the way it bounces back, even after changes are made to the structure. 

“You can drill holes into it, and it will still retain its integrity. And this improves the longevity of the material’s external life by leaps and bounds,” he says. 

Will the silica composite blocks be a game-changer in the way homes of the future are built? 

Perhaps. 

As Moon shares about her farmhouse, “There was no construction dust or pollution since it was pre-fabricated. The house even came with electrical and plumbing.” 

Meanwhile, for architect Shridhar, the work now lies in taking this material beyond experiments and into more homes, spaces, and everyday builds.

All pictures courtesy R+D Studio

Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: thebetterindia.com