Building with Papercrete and Paper Adobe

A Revolutionary New Way to Build Your Own Home for Next to Nothing by Gordon Solberg

Introduction Papercrete is essentially a type of industrial strength paper mach made with paper and cardboard, sand and portland cement. The concept is quite simple -- you build a mixer (essentially a huge kitchen blender), mix the dry ingredients with water to form a slurry, cast the slurry into blocks or panels, and let it dry. When it hardens up, papercrete is lightweight (it's 80 percent air), an excellent insulator (R 2.8 per inch), holds its shape even when wet, and is remarkably strong (compressive strength of 260 psi). And, since it contains paper fibers, it has considerable tensile strength as well as compressive strength. Papercrete is a remarkable building material, and is remarkably inexpensive, since all the ingredients (except for the cement) are free or nearly free. This country wastes a criminal amount of paper and cardboard each year. Americans aren't even making a pretense of recycling most of it. Our landfills are clogged with trash. Millions of people have substandard housing. Papercrete offers a way to turn "trash" paper and cardboard into inexpensive houses that are strong, well-insulated and easily built. Papercrete can simultaneously reduce our overuse of landfills while providing affordable housing for millions of people. This is an elegant, win-win solution to these two problems. Laura and I have known about papercrete since the mid 90s, but to us it was just another fringe building technique, and we didn't pay much attention to it until early 1998, when we started hearing about some people living at an intentional community called City of the Sun near Columbus, NM who were building houses out of recycled newspapers and magazines. This sounded like an intriguing idea, and we decided to do an article about it for Dry Country

News, the magazine we were putting out at the time. Then a friend of ours visited the paper house builders, and returned all excited and enthusiastic about what they were doing. Our curiosity was now totally aroused, and we asked our friend if she would be willing to take us down there to meet the builders and see what they were up to. We went to City of the Sun, met the builders, and our lives haven't been the same since.

permission. You can purchase Building with Papercrete and Paper Adobe from the Iris Catalog.

Index
Introduction Fibrous Cement -- A Revolutionary Building Material

What we found, when we first visited City Sean Sands' House of the Sun in March of 1998, was a couple of experimental builders -- Mike McCain Table of Contents and Sean Sands -- who were more than happy to show us what they were doing. We were impressed. These guys weren't just talking theory, they were building real houses out of paper. Sean's little 300-square-foot guest cottage was almost complete, and Mike had completed the walls for the circular, 1000-square-foot house that he was building. When they told us how much the materials for the houses were costing them -- less than $1.00 a square foot -- we knew that they were doing important work that deserved to be broadcast at a national level. And so Earth Quarterly was born. Papercrete was originally patented back in 1928, but it was too cheap and simple to be profitably marketed at that time, so it fell by the wayside until recently. It has been independently rediscovered by several experimenters, beginning in 1983. It's so new that people haven't even settled on a name for it yet. Mike McCain calls it fibrous cement. Eric Patterson, who independently discovered it in 1990, calls it padobe. Other people call it papercrete. This is the name I eventually settled on, since this is the most "user friendly" name to my ears. Laura and I visited City of the Sun twice more during the spring of 1998, and I wrote a long article about papercrete which appeared in Earth Quarterly #1, our special "Paper House Issue." During the summer of 1998, Laura and I built our own papercrete mixer, and started work on Earth Quarterly's papercrete office. After mixing up dozens of mixer loads of slurry, we realized how ridiculously simple the process really is -- it's very similar to working with concrete, except that papercrete is much less heavy, and is much easier to work with. During the summer we also visited Eric Patterson, the granddaddy of active papercrete pioneers, and learned a lot from him. In the fall of 1998, we visited Crestone, CO, where Mike McCain had spent the summer building several papercrete houses, and developing some amazing production capabilities. When we saw what seemed like acres of papercrete blocks and slabs drying in the Colorado sun, we realized the enormous potential of papercrete when people are seriously motivated to crank out the tonnage. We were impressed. In the spring of 1999, we visited Sean Sands again at City of the Sun, and were brought up-to-date on his latest project, paper adobe, a substance which has been pioneered by Bill Knauss of Tucson. Paper adobe is a mixture of dirt, paper and water, which hardens into a durable block that has a considerably higher insulating value than plain adobe. Being lighter in weight, it is easier to work with. And, since all the ingredients are free or almost free, Sean has reduced his materials cost down to a remarkable 16 cents a square foot. He has every expectation that he will be able to reduce his materials cost to zero. If that's not revolutionary, then I don't know what is.

This book contains all of the papercrete articles from the first five issues of Earth Quarterly. We are also including University of Arizona architecture professor Mary Hardin's article on paper bale construction, since it is another innovative way to utilize "waste" paper as a building material. This book is not a connect-the-dots builder's guide. We do plan to work closely with both Eric Patterson and Mike McCain to produce a couple of builder's guides, and hope to publish at least one of these during the summer of 1999. We also plan to have a video out by May 1999. This book is intended to be a thorough presentation of the papercrete and paper adobe concept from as many different angles as possible. Using this book, a clever builder will have more than adequate information to build his/her own papercrete house. We need to emphasize that papercrete and paper adobe are experimental! Mistakes have been made, and will continue to be made. Because they are so new, there is no proof that papercrete and paper adobe will stand up to the elements for the long term (20 years or more). However, it seems reasonable that if proper precautions are taken, that papercrete and paper adobe will last indefinitely. Laura and I are excited to be associated with papercrete and paper adobe. There is probably enough paper and cardboard thrown away each day in this country to build a small town. Once papercrete catches on, it has the potential to revolutionize the building industry, an industry which desperately needs to make a quantum jump from the 19th to the 21st Century.

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