Classy Trash: Recycled Paper Bale Colorado Home
(Page 2 of 4)
July/August 2002
By Robyn Griggs Lawrence
Tri-R, a Denver recycling facility that had worked with Eichelburger on his barn, saved Rich seventy bales of poly-coated kraft carrier board—laundry soap boxes—that had been treated for moisture resistance and printed on. The material was extremely clean but also very difficult to recycle because of the coating. “Much of this type of coated paperboard ends up in landfills,” Rich explains. Any kind of paperboard—except for corrugated cardboard, which is not structurally sound because it compresses—will work, he adds. “You can get paper bales from anybody who’s got a lot of volume—recycling companies in all major cities handle this stuff. Using paper bales to build with is doable anywhere but probably more applicable in the West because of the lack of moisture.”
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Tri-R gave Rich the paperboard bales for free; the company was happy to be rid of them. For the home’s foundation, Rich paid two cents per pound (about $20 per bale) for twenty-eight bales made of postconsumer PVC trash: toys, laundry baskets, shampoo bottles. (He used these because they were readily available at the time, but any kind of plastic materials will work.) These he laid into a five-and-a-half-foot-wide foundation trench prepared with compacted Class C road-base stone to act as a footing.
Building and learning
For Rich and Ann, the building process was all about learning and improvising. Rich and a helper, Mike Young, raised the bales in about six weeks and stabilized them with a concrete bond beam that proved to be the most harrowing and dramatic part of the entire building process.
“Nobody in Fraser had done a bond beam like this one before,” Rich says, so he was completely on his own. He built a wooden framework atop the bales, drove rebar into them, and then poured concrete into the framework. “We didn’t know if it was going to hold or not,” he says. “It worked fine, but we didn’t know.”
Once roof trusses were set and covered with plywood, Rich’s job became much easier. “Until that time, the biggest hassle had been covering and uncovering the bales with plastic every day,” he says. “I wanted to keep the top of the bales dry so moisture didn’t pool on them and cause mildew and rot.”
Because he didn’t know whether the bales would compress, Rich hung the interior wall framing and drywall off the ceiling joist so that they would have space to move if the walls settled. “That was a hassle, and I wouldn’t do it again because there was no settling,” he says.
Sealing the envelope
Rich insulated all the interior walls for sound control, but the thirty-six-inch bale walls (which provide an insulation value of R-30) didn’t need any extra help. However, because the bales weren’t consistently square, he slid six-inch insulation between the ends during assembly to fill in gaps. He also blew sixteen inches of cellulose into the ceiling (giving it a value of R-50) and three-and-a-half inches of foam just inside the plastic foundation bales so that none of the radiant heat emanating from cables laid under the floors would be lost. As a result, the floor temperature remains a constant sixty-five degrees, though Ann points out that “you’d swear it was warmer than that.”