One Solution.
Recycled Living was founded to help create solutions to houselessness and plastic. We have the opportunity to unite these two crises by recycling plastic into a modular building material to construct homes for those who need them.
The process starts with our partners in plastic manufacturing. We have established connections with two manufacturers in Portland; Falcon Plastics and 3D Plastics, and with two companies; Pacsun and Paschal Farms.
The combined plastic generated from these sources alone, is over 15,000lbs of plastic per month. When Recycled Living has the capacity, we will redirect this plastic from the landfill and international transport.
Hundreds of thousands of pounds of useful plastic is headed to landfills, sent to other countries, or being incinerated all of the time simply because there’s no other option.
We hope to create another option.
Once we have reached our necessary goals, the process will look like this:
Donated plastic would arrive in our facility to be used as the input material in a plastic injection molding machine. As the plastic is fed into the machine it fills a steel mold. The plastic undergoes extreme pressure and heat to fill the volume of the mold. The plastic material is ejected, and the process repeats.
Plastic waste in; building materials out.
The material design has been created by our Lead Engineer Patricia Fischer; a materials engineer at Boeing with experience in 3D printing homes and construction. The current design is a modular plastic panel with a hollow hexagon infill to be used in the floor, ceiling and walls in place of traditional plywood.
We presented these designs to our nonprofit partners to ask how this panel would benefit tiny home construction. We found out that plywood can make up more than 70% of the total cost in wood for a tiny home. Additionally, framing a home was as simple as screwing together 2x4”s - something that volunteers had completed, while sheathing and Tyvek wrapping a home to protect from moisture, required more contractors and guidance. We learned that our material would bring down the cost in materials to around $3,207.42 per home and the construction cost in labor to around $3,989.
“Tiny homes constructed below $10k per unit would be a game changer for Portland”.
- Skyler Brocker-Knapp; Portland’s Senior Policy Advisor
The figures below shows the estimated breakdown for a traditional versus a panel built house: Its simplicity as an alternative to plywood makes it easily adoptable by nonprofits, while exciting those who care about our climate as a material which lowers CO2 emissions and plastic pollution. This recycled building material is the key to affordability and is a solution for plastic’s harmful effects on our environment.
Materials and labor are the largest cost when it comes to current housing-first communities. Utilizing free plastic takes 54.7% of the material cost away while a modular design means volunteers can assemble the tiny homes, greatly reducing the cost of contracting construction.
After Production
After the first production run, we will begin testing the qualities and design of the modular material. Once the material is certified through ongoing collaboration with PSU, we will start construction on the first home on the property of Cultivate Initiatives; a phenomenal houselessness organization and a recent collaboration. While the first home is undergoing construction, we hope to supply other housing projects with the materials and design to significantly lower the cost of other developments while producing these materials to serve as a catalyst to recycle tens of thousands of pounds of plastic. The images below are 3D visualizations.
Following the construction of the first home and with current support from The City Of Portland, we hope to construct a series of homes on the same plot of land to form a community. Below are visualizations of additional home and community designs.
