Building from Waste

conTenTS

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Introduction: Building from Waste Dirk e. Hebel marta H. Wisniewska felix Heisel

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City and Refuse: Self-reliant Systems and Urban Terrains mitchell Joachim

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Hands off: Urban Mining! A Plea for the Re-evaluation of Substandard Housing Jörg Stollmann

DenSifieD

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Densified Waste Materials

ReconfiguReD

063

Reconfigured Waste Materials

TRanSfoRmeD

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Transformed Waste Materials

DeSigneD

127

Designed Waste Materials

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Organic Waste Design: A New Culture of Designed Waste Products Sascha Peters

151

Cultivated Waste Materials

172 178 180 184 187

Product Directory Load-bearing Products Self-supporting Products Insulating Products Waterproofing Products Finishing Products

193 195 196 198 199 200

appendix Notes Illustration Credits About the Authors and the Contributors Index of Products and Projects Index of Manufacturers and Designers Acknowledgements

Book design: Binocular, New York Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases.

culTivaTeD

For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained.

This publication is also available as an e-book pdf (ISBN 978-3-03821-375-8) and EPUB (978-3-03821-932-3) © 2014 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Printed in Germany ISBN 978-3-03821-584-4 987654321

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RECONFIGURED WASTE MATERIALS

CASE STUDIES

Tuff Roof p. 66 Plasphalt p. 70 Artek Pavilion p. 72 Paper Tile Vault p. 76 Agricultural Waste Panels p. 80 ReMaterials Roof Panels p. 82 Ecor p. 84 Natura 2 p. 86 Wine Cork Tiles p. 88 UltraTouch Denim Insulation p. 90 Vault201 p. 92

A configuration describes the arrangement of elements in a particular form, figure, or combination in order to perform a certain function. Reconfigured waste materials, in our definition, thus comprise all products where the components of raw waste have been rearranged before being processed into a new construction element. Shredding, breaking, sawing, or grinding are some of the forms of applied mechanical force used to change the original configuration of the waste material. The resulting pellets, chips, strands, fibres, etc. are then processed further, usually by mixing them with other components such as organic, inorganic, or mineral adhesives and pressing them into moulds of any form and size.

Even though reconfigured waste materials depend on similar processes as densified waste materials, the reconfiguration and rearrangement activates additional product characteristics and it implies the possibility to change form. Depending on the intended functionality of the construction elements to be conceived, the method allows to manipulate and control their density, weight, alignment, or even aesthetic qualities.

While smaller pieces correlate with a greater surface area, thereby engendering more interaction and friction with the resins or adjacent materials, crushing to microelements may destroy some of the qualities of the original waste material.

This is especially relevant for products for load-bearing applications that are required to absorb external forces. Lumber waste materials, for example, can either be reconfigured in chips to function as open-strand board elements with high mechanical performance due to their directional fibre arrangement within the chip; or they can be used as sawdust with rather limited capacities.

Mixtures of different materials – waste or non-waste – are a common method of creating new products. Careful engineering allows waste materials to become part of an up-cycling process. The combined matter might have a higher performance in terms of material property, quality, or financial as well as environmental value than each individual component by itself. This process of up-cycling has become more and more widespread in the building industry and other markets, due to the “green” marketability of the resulting product and the savings in resources coming from the waste stream.

In any case the process has to be carefully evaluated, since marketing sometimes seems more important than the actual scientific proof.

This chapter introduces waste particles as a basic material for product development.

When Tetra Pak, a trademark of the food packaging industry, was invented in Sweden and marketed for the first time in 1951, the

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Hebel, Wisniewska, Heisel / Building from Waste 978-3-03821-584-4 September 2014 www.birkhauser.com

RECONFIGURED WASTE MATERIALS

RECONFIGURED WASTE MATERIALS

3 Designed for the Milan Furniture Fair in 2007, the Artek Pavilion was subsequently re-erected in many parts of the world, including Helsinki and Miami.

4 Eventually, the pavilion was sold at Sotheby’s as an “Important 20th Century Design Object” in 2008.

ARTEk PAvILION

In search of a material to build a showroom for the Artek furniture company at the 2007 Milan Furniture Fair, the commissioned architect Shigeru Ban selected a new wood-plastic composite created from label printing waste.

In the United Kingdom, an estimated 180,000 tons of waste is produced by self-adhesive label printing machines every year.4 This plastic-based residue includes matrix coming from make-ready, set-up, misprints, or the remains of trimming and punching. Label printers are becoming more and more efficient, but they still create a vast amount of waste that usually cannot be recycled because various materials are bonded together: unsorted plastics, glues, papers, and printing ink. To separate these is very difficult or nearly impossible and for long the industry has looked for alternative solutions.

UPM, a Finnish forest industry company and producer of self-adhesive label materials and biocomposites, has developed a way to reuse the waste paper trimmings containing cellulose fibres and plastic polymers, which are an excess in the firm’s self-adhesive label manufacture and processing. The proportion of raw materials in these labels is 60% cellulose and 40% plastics.

Shredded and shaped under heat, the resulting flakes form a strong wood-plastic composite

5 Translucent corrugation of the roof allows for natural lighting of the interior.

without requiring any additional additives, combining the best properties of plastic and wood. Next to the structural robustness and strength, the new material shows very low moisture absorption rates, so that no additional surface treatment is required even for outdoor use. The absence of lignin, the natural wood binder, prevents the material from turning grey when exposed to UV light. Products can be manufactured by extrusion and injection moulding and handled with conventional tools.

For the Furniture Fair showroom, extruded L-shaped profiles were tested extensively for their structural and physical properties. Based on the findings, the architecture team developed a unique design, using only L-shaped profile types and combining them into columns and beams in areas where more strength was needed. The result is a 40-m-long building constructed out of a glue-laminated paper waste material. Due to their properties and versatile shapes, the L-profiles could also be used as a waterproofing roof and façade system, by overlaying the profiles shaping a corrugated surface. The building is easy to set up and dismantle, allowing the pavilion to move from its original location in Milan to several other fairs and exhibitions in Helsinki and Miami. In 2008, the pavilion was sold at Sotheby’s sale of “Important 20th Century Design Objects”.

1

3

2

PROJECT DATA

PRODUCT DATA

RESOURCE

STANDARD SIzE

Label printer waste

60 mm × 60 mm × custom

MANUFACTURER

STANDARD ThICkNESS

UPM Biocomposites, Lahti, Finland

8 mm

DESIGNER

1,200 kg/m3

Shigeru Ban, Shigeru Ban Architects, Paris, France PRODUCT DIRECTORy

Load-bearing, page 174; Waterproofing, page 186

1–2 The principle resource for the structural members are self-adhesive label scraps composed of paper and plastic.

DENSITy

4

BENDING STRENGTh

12 MPa (EN 310) FIRE RATING

Class E (EN ISO 11925–2) WATER ABSORPTION (24 h)

< 2.5% (CEN/TS 15534)

5

072

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RECONFIGURED WASTE MATERIALS

RECONFIGURED WASTE MATERIALS

1

6

2

3

11

9

1m

7

9 The frames of the pavilion structure consist entirely of UPM profiles.

10 Plan view of the structure. The 40-m-long, open-ended pavilion is based on a repetitive 2-m-long module.

1m

11 The L-profiles are bolted together to form load-bearing T or X-shaped elements.

8

1 exterior cladding out of L-shaped profiles 2 connection bolt 3 T and X-shaped structural elements

6 Biocomposites by UPM are extruded in a variety of different shapes and properties.

7 The L-shaped profiles went through a period of structural tests to optimize their design.

2.40 m

8 The pavilion structure uses exclusively L-shaped profiles for structural, cladding, and finishing applications.

10

1m

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Hebel, Wisniewska, Heisel / Building from Waste 978-3-03821-584-4 September 2014 www.birkhauser.com