Author(s): Gordon Solberg
ISBN: 1928627005
Order From: Amazon
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Papercrete is a type of industrial strength paper maché 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 collection of articles is not a step-by-step manual, but does offer a wealth of information about the topic. It’s the most comprehensive source of papercrete information available in one place. You’ll see two ways to build a papercrete mixer, several dome projects, the use of slipforms, several types of block forms, a structure made from paper bales and how several pioneers are pushing the evolution of papercrete.
The packet includes issues 1 through 5 of Earth Quarterly, plus Papercrete News Issues 1 and two. The book Building with Papercrete was a collection of articles that appeared in the Earth Quarterly (Issues 1 – 4 ). The book is now out of print, but this packet contains everything that appeared in the book, and considerably more.
1999 – 2000, 168 pages
