The North American Development Bank met onsite with papercrete project director Jose Luis Muñoz (left, foreground) and Border Partners personnel on October 18. The papercrete mixer and the soaking cardboard are visible on the right.
By Peter Edmunds
People in Palomas are always impressed by Border Partners’ papercrete buildings. That’s because they’re so much cooler inside in the summer months. And, interestingly enough, they’re also so much warmer in the winter than is the typical Palomas cement block building. In a town with temperatures over 100 degrees in the summer and less than 20 degrees in the winter, people know how important comfortable indoor temperatures are. It’s difficult to stay comfortable with such temperature fluctuations.
Currently, our Education Center and a storage shed at our greenhouse site are built of papercrete blocks. This year, we hope to expand the use of this material.
Thanks to a grant from The North America Development Bank* we plan to build more papercrete buildings. We’re planning ten more garden sheds as well as five additions constructed from papercrete blocks to existing homes during the coming year.
What Is Papercrete?
Papercrete is a building material composed of recycled paper (in our case, cardboard), water and some cement. Papercrete requires much less cement than a typical cement block. That makes it much less expensive to produce.
Our crew of local workers have already set up a work yard at a local high school where they are making the blocks with a mixer (think: a very large blender!). When the workers pour that slurry that the mixer produces into a mold, the slurry forms into the block’s shape.
Why is papercrete a superior building material?
- Papercrete blocks have a high insulating value. They’re much more effective at insulating than is a cement block.
- The blocks weigh much less than a typical cement block. Because they are lighter than cement blocks they are much easier to use for projects. They’re easier to lift, to place and to build with in construction projects.
- Composed of discarded paper, papercrete blocks create a permanent use for what would be garbage.
- The process of making cement pollutes the air. So, any product that uses less cement is a “win” for the environment. Papercrete blocks use much less cement than cement blocks.
Our Papercrete Project Goals
Our papercrete project has two main goals:
- We want to introduce the process of making papercrete to local residents. and
- We want to improve air quality in the region.
The papercrete construction blocks will be made from cardboard which we’re diverting from the town dump. Normally, in the dump, this cardboard is burned along with toxic garbage. This burning process creates toxic air (smoke) pollution. Our goal is to divert as much as 70 tons of paper from the dump in the coming year. This will eliminate a significant amount of toxic smoke from the air.
In addition to using papercrete blocks to use in building structures, another use for papercrete that we plan to explore is making insulation panels. We’d like to install these panels inside of an existing metal roof. We will organize workshops for local homeowners for this project. The homeowners will learn to make these papercrete panels and also how to install them at their own home. This useful panel insulation will protect the residents from temperature extremes.
We have a double hope. By this time next year, we expect there will be at least only a few more papercrete buildings in town. We also hope that we’ll interest homeowners to use papercrete for their own building projects.
And, a third underlying goal is that we hope this new interest will create a demand that will fuel a new small business in Puerto Palomas to produce papercrete blocks to sell.
In addition to introducing papercrete to the community, this project will employ five part-time, local workers. Five more workers will earn income for their livelihood and for their family’s well being.
Thus, this papercrete project addresses all four of Border Partners’ major goals in Palomas:
- Education: teaching homeowners a new resource
- Health: providing a healthier home environment and improved air quality to the community
- Sustainable Technology: expanding the use of an energy efficient building product
- Economic Growth: providing local jobs to local residents.
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*The North American Development Bank is a binational financial institution capitalized and governed equally by the Federal governments of the USA and Mexico to provide financing to support the development and implementation of environmental projects in the border region.