Fibrous Cement

Shelter is the most compelling element of any lifestyle. The need for shelter is hard-wired into us. Only "shelter seekers" survived to produce offspring, and we are their descendants. So it's no surprise that we all have dreams about "the perfect home," along with our other dreams of perfect health, perfect happiness, perfect prosperity, and the perfect fulfillment of our souls.

Our shelter fantasies begin when we are very young. Put some young children into a room with a chair and a blanket and what will they do? They'll drape the blanket over the chair and create their own little shelter, along with a fantasy world to go with it.

After we become adults, our shelter fantasies become more substantial, and much more expensive. Most people seem to have bought into the myth that a "real house" must be very large and very expensive, requiring a mortgage and the better part of lifetime to pay off.

A minority of people (who Earth Quarterly is designed for) have a more penetrating insight into the whole "shelter question," and we ask ourselves questions like, "Why should houses be so large? Why should they be so expensive? Why should they waste so many resources? Why should we have to enslave ourselves for the rest of our lives just to have a decent house? Why do contractors, bankers, realtors and escrow agents drive big fancy cars?" After we answer these questions to our satisfaction, we get to the biggest question of them all: "What can we do about all this?"

The Power of Building Our Own Homes

There have always been people (such as the readers of Earth Quarterly) who have a "can do" attitude. We figure that we can do just about anything we set our minds to. For example, we can even build our own homes! (What a revolutionary concept this is in the modern world, where "consumers" (who are more helpless than they would like to admit) are unable to provide for their most basic needs, such as food and shelter.) When we build our own homes, we empower ourselves in a way that merely paying off a mortgage never can.

When we build our own homes, we reconnect with part of our own sacred birthright, and we discover that we were designed to be at home on this planet. We are supposed to be here, and it comes naturally to us! We are not just mere "consumers," or expendable cogs in some corporate machine -- we are part of Nature! We possess, if we will but tap into it, the inner wisdom required to live on this planet in the way that Nature intended. We are inherently competent to build our own homes, grown our own food, develop our own livelihoods and live in genuine communities -- and when we do this, we are then able to share the benefits of our existence with our friends, neighbors, and community-at-large. Rather than being just a bunch of alienated consumers, each jealously protecting our own narrow self-interest, we have the potential within us to create a genuine civilization that goes beyond the mere accumulation of monetary wealth and the distractions it provides.

A vital component of true happiness is being competent in the natural world, and that this type of happiness isn't necessarily to be found in spending all day working at a meaningless or semi-meaningless, pre-programmed job and then going out to a movie at night "to unwind." Being competent to fill a narrow niche within the System is all well and good for people who are drawn in this direction, but not everyone is going to find fulfillment there.

I think millions of people are hungry to be doing something more real, more meaningful, more soul-fulfilling with their lives. Getting down to the physical nitty-gritty of actually building a home is an excellent place to start. It's not "the answer" in and of itself, but it is definitely a start.

Paper Houses

There are many ways to build an inexpensive shelter, depending on where you live, and what kinds of materials you have available -- the most common alternative building materials include some combination of rocks, dirt, concrete, logs, straw bales, old tires, and... paper.

Did I just hear somebody mention paper? This is preposterous! What could be more ridiculous than a paper house? Remember the story of the Three Little Pigs, and how the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed, I man, seriously now, can you imagine what the Big Bad Wolf would have done to a paper house?

Well, let me explain. A paper house isn't made out of sheets of paper blowing in the wind. Instead, it's built with a type of industrial-strength paper maché called fibrous cement. Basically what you do is take a large mixing vat, soak old magazines and newspapers until they're soft, and then mix together a soup of 60 percent paper, 30 percent screened dirt or sand, and 10 percent cement. Then you take this glop and either (1) make it into blocks or slabs, (2) pour it into forms directly onto your wall, (3) plaster over existing walls, or (4) use it for mortar. (It's possible to use straw or even dried grass to supply the fiber if paper is unavailable. Cardboard can also be used -- its only disadvantage is its bulk.)

When dry, fibrous cement is lightweight, an excellent insulator, holds its shape well, and is remarkably strong. It is resistant to being crushed (compressive strength) and to being pulled apart (tensile strength). (Regular concrete, on the other hand, has high compressive strength but no tensile strength to speak of, which is why it usually has to be reinforced with steel bars, called "rebar.")

Fibrous cement is highly fire-resistant. Since the individual paper fibers are saturated with cement, oxygen doesn't have a chance to penetrate, and combustion cannot be sustained. I tried an experiment, aiming a propane torch at a fibrous cement block to see what would happen. The block charred on the surface where the flame hit it, but it didn't burn after several minutes of direct flame. A piece of 1x2 lumber, by comparison, burst into flame within a few seconds of being torched.

Consider some figures: Fibrous cement has a compressive strength of 260 psi, without sand in the mix. Adding sand triples the compressive strength. An eight-foot-high, one-foot-thick wall of fibrous cement has a load bearing strength of 15 tons per running foot, yet weights only 120 pounds per running foot! An elaborate foundation is not necessary, because the weight of a wall amounts to only one pound per square inch! The insulating value of fibrous cement is considerable -- its "R" value is 2.8 per inch. This means that a 12" wall has an "R" value of 33.6, which is impressive by any standard.

In addition to increasing the compressive strength, there is another -- astounding -- advantage to adding sand to fibrous cement -- you end up with a substance that has a high insulating value and a high thermal mass, all in one package. There is no other building material that can make this claim. How this works is: each individual grain of sand embedded in the "matrix" of fibrous cement is surrounded by insulating air pockets and paper fibers. Because of all that insulation, it takes a relatively long time for heat to flow from one sand grain to another. Since the sand is distributed evenly throughout the mix, you end up with "the ultimate thermal flywheel effect" which is amazingly efficient -- a fibrous cement wall will take all day to warm up, and all night to cool down. Even if fibrous cement wasn't so cheap, it would be revolutionary for this reason alone.

Factoring in (1) low cost, (2) high tensile strength as well as high compressive strength, (3) high insulating value and (4) high thermal mass, we definitely have here a substance that has the potential to create a revolution in the construction industry. It's about time!

One advantage of working with fibrous cement is you don't have to worry too much about how much water to add to the mix. With regular concrete, if you add too much water, the final product will be weaker than it should be. With fibrous cement, the cement is absorbed by the paper fibers, ensuring that it is evenly distributed throughout the mix, and any excess water simply evaporates or oozes into the ground.

When dry, fibrous cement can be sawed with a chain saw or a bow saw, so you can build your walls first and add windows and doorways later wherever you want. You can screw into it or sand it. The blocks can be keyed, and fitted together later. It's amazingly versatile stuff.