Building Materials: Papercrete

Using papercrete, you can literally build all the walls in your house with recycled paper.

 

 

What is Papercrete?

 

Papercrete is an alternative building material that significantly reduces the cost of home construction while offering many of the most important qualities of traditional concrete.   Some have been able to reduce their building costs to about a tenth of what others have spent for essentially the same house.  That's right, instead of spending a hundred thousand dollars to build your own home, you may be able to bring the cost down to ten or twenty thousand — or even less, depending on other options.  And you won't have to sacrifice quality.

 

Papercrete has received a lot of good press in recent years because it's a proven way to build inexpensive walls and houses.  Papercrete is a custom blend of recycled paper, dirt or sand, Portland cement.  It's one of the ways you can use the materials you have on

hand to build your house.  You can use it to cast blocks, pour forms, build preformed panels, shape into dome structures, carve and mold like clay, use it as out outer coating, as a filler, or whatever you might ordinarily do with traditional concrete. 

 

Papercrete offers many of the benefits of concrete and adobe.  It can be made to be as strong and sturdy as traditional brick or cinderblock walls, and as water resistant as it needs to be.  With the proper mix, shrinkage is minimal to none and fire resistance is excellent.  It can cut the cost of building your home to a fraction of the cost of building with traditional materials.

 

You need no special tools for papercrete that you wouldn't already use for mixing Portland cement with other materials.  A paper shredder will be handy, and can be found new and used at reasonable prices.  Standard trowels, rakes, and other building and shaping tools can be used to pack, smooth and shape papercrete. 

 

Don't Blame the "Experts"

 

New homes have been going up in many areas and climates using some form of papercrete for exterior and interior walls.  More than one building expert has been favorably impressed with the results.

 

Should you try it?  Only you can be the judge of that.  Do the research, try out some blocks, or even an experimental wall in your backyard or in an open field, and study the results.  You will be amazed at what papercrete can do. 

 

Before building a home with papercrete or any alternative materials, you will want to experiment with the materials.  You can certainly get good ideas of what should work by reading what others are doing.  But the only way to be sure (and it is your home, after all) is to conduct your own experiments.  Try different ratios of paper to soil to cement.  Check the drying and curing times.  Check the hardness of cured blocks.  Do some compression tests of your own, with wood blocks and an old hydraulic jack or two.  Compare the strength of papercrete blocks to standard concrete or cinder blocks.

PAPERCRETE can be shaped, sculpted, colored, painted and worked as clay, adobe or traditional concrete materials.

 

This may sound a waste of time and money.  But you can't compare a few weeks or months of testing, and even the cost of a brand new jack (but why buy a new one?) to the money and time you will spend trying to repair or rebuild walls that falter later on.  Papercrete is a great material, as many have already discovered.  But, as with any other building material, you need to know firsthand what the strengths and weaknesses are before you begin actual construction on a house that will be around for decades to come.

 

Think About It

 

Traditionally, fiber has played a big part in home building.  Some of the oldest civilizations built houses using straw and mud, reinforced with wood poles or sticks, and covered with some form of grass or leaves.  Across America today, the most common house is the wood frame house, using wood (and wood products) for walls, floors and roofs.  It only makes sense that we should at least consider adding fiber materials when making concrete.

 

Adding fibrous materials to any earthen product often improves resiliency and even strength.  Strange as it may sound, the tiny fibers in straw and other natural materials have proven over the centuries to enhance the durability of adobe and mud walls.  In the same way, paper pulp can add body to walls, without weakening the structure.  Granted, alone paper will not make a good wall.  But when properly prepared and mixed in with sandy soil and a little cement, paper can become a reliable building material.

 

Best of All, It's Free

 

You won't find papercrete (just yet) at the local building supply center.  Yet nothing could be easier to come by.  Sources of paper can include just about anything made of paper.  Newspapers, old office papers, scraps from print shop bins, inside pages of old phone books, used corrugated cartons, shredded cereal boxes — you name it.  You’ll naturally want to avoid paper that's been soiled with food, grease or other materials that will spoil or detract from a good bonding.  Glossy papers can be used, but only in very small ratios to just regular paper. 

 

Have a paper drive in your community or in any community near you.  And collect all the paper you want for free.  Then simply shred it and use it.  Water will break down the sheets of regular paper.  But if you can shred it up first, you'll make it faster and easier to mix.  Simply collect and prepare.  It's all free.  Using papercrete, you can literally build all the walls in your house with recycled paper.  That counts for a lot in itself.

 

More Information?

 

There are excellent books and videos, workshops, and hands-on opportunities for those who want to fully understand how to build a house with papercrete and other alternative materials.   The more you know, the better off you are.  If you want free information, you can learn a lot by doing a GOOGLE,  MSN,  YAHOO search on papercrete, paper adobe ("also dubbed paperadobe"), and paper cob. 

 

To start with, why not visit Papercrete.com?