The houses that trash built?
Hoping to fuel a campaign to save a UC Davis commune condemned for annihilation, a crowd of students, faculty and alumni morphed plastic bags into bricks, earth into concrete and bamboo into walls.
About 100 students, staff and alumni spent Friday, which was Earth Day, building a bench made of plastic bottles, plastic bags, bamboo, straw and dirt. Leaders of the project hope educating people about avant-garde, sustainable building techniques could help launch a redesign of the Domes, the embattled cooperative that student housing plans to destroy July 31.
“This project right here is just to get our hands dirty, said Brennan Blazer Bird, 23, who spearheaded the bench build, “to highlight these different technologies, how we use them and how we could use free student labor through experiential education to make things happen very cheaply.”
Fixing the Domes would cost more than $600,000, or $43,000 per dome, according to Feb. 2 article in Dateline, a university newspaper for faculty and staff. That’s too much, according to the campus administrators who made the decision.
Bird thinks tearing down and rebuilding the domes could be done for much less money. Tapping into free student labor and sustainable building practices like those used Friday would cost $140,000 for 14 dwellings, or $10,000 apiece, Bird said.
Mostly students broke down clay soil dug up from Davis. They added water to help break it down as well as sand and straw to make it stronger. Then they churned it together “till it’s kinda like cookie dough,” Bird said.
Volunteers and students scoring extra credit shoveled the mixture into plastic polypropylene bags and tamped the bag down to form the bench’s base. To finish off the bench, they used bamboo and made “eco-bricks” — 20-ounce plastic bottles stuffed with plastic grocery bags until they’re so dense, they act as building materials.
Bird hopes eco-bricks play a role in building sustainable dwellings at a re-imagined Domes cooperative.
“We could use the different domes to highlight different natural building tech,” he said about possible rebuild options.”There could be an earth bag dome, there could be a straw bale dome, there could be a bamboo dome, there could be a dome made out of bottle bricks.”
Twenty six people live in 14 dwellings on the 3 1/2-acre Domes property, tucked into the northwest corner of campus, off Orchard Road and west of La Rue Road.
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Coordinating the bench project caps Bird’s undergraduate career, which otherwise ended last month when the nature and culture major graduated. He has since moved to Palo Alto to pursue a career in environmental education.
Kurt Vaughn, 32, has lived in the Domes for 4 1/2 years. The ecology graduate student plans to move out before the July 31 destruction date, but said he wants future residents to enjoy the do-it-yourself spirit the commune engrained in him. Vaughn learned “innumerable skills” from mechanics to carpentry, farming, canning and preserving food and making bread from scratch.
“It’s a lifestyle,” he said after tamping earth bags, compressing the dirt inside into something concrete-like. “(You learn) so many different things just by living here and sharing skills with people and taking charge of the materials in your life and really delving into what it means to live sustainable.”
Organizers spearheading the bench project hope to extrapolate it not just to the Domes, but the campus’ Whole Earth Festival, planned May 6-8, said Willee Roberts, a 21-year-old international relations major. The springtime festival devoted to the environment, among other things, “has prided itself on being zero waste.” However, it’s never quite reached that goal, diverting 95 to 98 percent of waste from landfills.
“The only thing we haven’t been able to figure out is how to divert plastic film trash — the plastic bags that sneak in, the wrappers that sneak in,” Roberts said.
With eco-bricks, they now have a place for that stuff. Festival organizers can siphon off, wash and stuff plastic bags into bottles instead of throwing them away. Roberts estimated 100 to 200 students are already doing this with their own trash.
Those students are “looking at their trash, thinking about their trash, washing their trash and taking the time to stuff their trash into bottles,” he added. “Even knowing that you have to go through that with all of your trash makes you reduce the amount of trash you produce immensely.”
— Reach Jonathan Edwards at jedwards@davisenterprise.net or (530) 747-8052.
Short URL: http://www.davisenterprise.com/?p=37165
Posted by Jonathan Edwards
on Apr 23 2011.
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Great to see people working together and learning together to address some of the problems associated with waste, or what is perceived as waste. We need more of this and not less. Community continuity is necessary to evolve forward into the future with vibrancy.