The Next Green Building Material: Loofah?!
Look in your bathroom. Got a loofah in there? Ever used one? You know, like a sea sponge? Now think about it being used for building houses. Huh!? This is exactly what’s happening right now in Paraguay. Elsa Aldivar, a social activist teamed up with Pedro Padros, an industrial engineer to make this happen.
It didn’t happen right away. Aldivar was searching for a way to give women an earth friendly way to generate income, and encouraged them to cultivate loofah, that grows easily there, to be dried out and made into cosmetic products. But they found that a certain portion weren’t up to export standards, and 30% of the quality material was being shaved off while making mats, slippers, insoles and the cosmetic tools.
So she wondered what use/value could be created from these. Material for house walls and roofs, she decided. After extensive trial and error, she and Padros devised the perfect combination of loofah, recycled plastic, and things like cotton netting and corn husks, all of which would otherwise be disposed of. At less than $3 a square meter, competitive with wood.But beyond being merely equivalent in price, it exceeds wood’s capabilities, with the ability to take dye during manufacture, making painting unnecessary. They are flexible, able to better withstand disaster situations. If they do fall, there’s less chance of injury, as they’re lighter weight. And they can be recycled, repeatedly. And with care in initial selection of plastics, when they can no longer be remade into housing material, they can be used as biofuel.
While totally viable as a building material in many environments far outside rural Paraguay, their ease of use, and ability to work with local, familiar materials like adobe makes them ideal for use locally, providing both shelter and income.
They are the winners of the Rolex Award for Enterprise, and with this, they’ll be building three demonstration homes and have a promotion center, where both urban and rural people will be able to learn about this innovative material.
Readers: What else are you seeing out there to make super efficient use of resources, for building and otherwise? What other, lesser known options are being developed that we should know about?
Article & image source: Rolex Awards for Enterprise
The loofa is actually a squash-ish type of plant. I and everyone I know were equally surprised to find out it wasn’t a sea sponge.
Can you explain how is this material being utilized. Do they make it into boards or are they just blending it with traditional materials?
Thank you,
@Joe: Correct. They have great pictures of them growing in the article linked near the end of this article. It’s what’s left behind after drying them out.
@Aristides: From what I gather, it, along with other plant material, is blended with recycled plastic that’s been heated, then it’s all shaped into boards. The plastic is selected so that when the material has been recycled so many times it can’t be made into boards again, it can be used as biofuel.
[...] You turfed your roof? Yesterday’s green, darling, so yesterday’s green. Anyone who is anyone is lining theirs with loofah. Obviously you haven’t been hobnobbing with the right sort of people over at Ecopreneurist. [...]
this is brilliant, though i always thought that except the natural loofahs, most were actually made of some form of a plastic derivative and not squash, but heck, i don’t really know much about materials.
just in general, i love the name of the blog, great word.
This is not exactly “brilliant” at this point in the info horizon. We need a lot more detailed description of a process by means of which loofa et al (corn husks…) can be mixed with “melted plastic” to make anything effective as a building material, without poisoning both the air and the people melting the plastic. You can get a clue about that general subject by lighting a piece of poly rope on fire and inhaling in the vicinity! My understanding of “green” must be different from yours….burning plastic as a biofuel?? I think cement might make an effective admixture, perhaps, but melted plastic seems counter-intuitive to me.