Building for the future

By MATT PHINNEY,
September 4, 2006

MASON - Zach Rabon said he was a bit of a hippie kid growing up, but not a ''tree-hugger'' by any means.

After graduating from high school, though, he studied ecology and conservation of natural resources at Texas Tech University. What he learned there scared him, he said.

''We take so much for granted,'' he said. ''We walk around and we see the trees and we see the rivers, and we think it will be there forever. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when we run out of natural resources. Something has to be done.''

Now the Grateful Dead fan is a makeshift eco-scientist, studying new formulas for ''papercrete'' building blocks, made mostly from recycled paper, or cellulose. He has created the Blox Building System, a variety of building blocks that represent an alternative to traditional building material.

The Eco-Blox is 60-percent cellulose, 30-percent cement and additives and 10-percent water. The mixture creates millions of air pockets that act as insulation.

Much of the cellulose in Rabon's blocks come from discarded lottery tickets, phone books and newsprint, he said.

''You can't get simpler,'' Rabon said. ''You eliminate framers and painters and cut out all that labor cost. This is one real quick, simple process, and it produces zero waste.''

While it may be made out of mostly paper, it will take much more than a big, bad wolf to blow these blocks down.

The eco-friendly papercrete blocks have been hit with sledgehammers, set on fire and put through simulated tornadoes - and someone even shot a bullet at one. Nothing has hurt them yet, Rabon said.

Rabon's company, Mason GreenStar, has built several homes with his blocks in this small Hill Country town. Rabon said the need for eco-friendly building material is growing throughout the world and wants to ship the blocks to developing areasoverseas.

''Something has to give,'' he said. ''It takes an acre of cut lumber to build one 2,000-square-foot home. And it takes 30 years to regenerate that acre. There is not enough material to rebuild New Orleans, and there is a lot of interest this overseas in Third World countries where the population is doubling and there is nothing to build with.''

The concept of using processed paper to make building blocks has been around since the 1920s, said Kent Rabon, Zach's father and a homebuilder for more than 30 years. For some reason, interest disappeared but is now back in force, in part, he said, because of the shortage of traditional building materials and the rising cost of building homes.

Mason GreenStar is building a 2,000-square-foot house out of the blocks. The building in Mason looks like an adobe home. Zach's home for the past three years is a 3,200-square-foot home in a more traditional style than the newer adobe house, and is largest single story building in the world made out of the bricks.

The blocks cost $2 a piece, and a home can cost anywhere from $80 to $100 a square foot. The processed paper, or cellulose, also is an excellent insulator, Zach Rabon said.

''You can set the thermostat at 75 degrees and the air conditioner won't come on for two days,'' he said, ''and the same thing with the heat.''

The blocks are advertised as mold-, fire-, termite- and water-resistant, as well as lightweight and highly insulated. The blocks, which are 14 inches long, 10 inches wide and 4 inches thick, weigh about 8 pounds.

According to Livinginpaper.com, a Web site dedicated to papercrete, the basic components are water and nearly any kind of recyclable paper goods - cardboard, glossy magazine stock, advertising brochures, junk mail or just about any other type of ''mixed (lower) grade'' paper is acceptable.

However, waxy paper and cardboard are not used in the Rabons' blocks.

Barry J Fuller, creator of the LivingInPaper Web site, has been studying the papercrete industry for three years. He became interested in alternative building materials when he decided to build a low-cost home - without taking out a mortgage.

Fuller got a grant through Arizona State University and eventually met Zach Rabon.

Papercrete houses are gaining wide support in rural and urban areas alike, Fuller said. He is building his 700-square-foot home in Tempe, Ariz., for about $40 per square foot by doing the labor himself.

The house will have a stucco coating and won't have to be repainted for about 20 years, he said.

''No. 1, it's affordable,'' Fuller said during a phone interview. ''I am putting some really artistic touches around the door and windows. It's extremely solid and sustainable. There is a great environmental investment because I'm using something that would otherwise go into a landfill.''

Fuller is using his neighbors' discarded mail and packaging from grocery stores as cellulose.

The problem with papercrete, as with any alternative building material, is public perception, Fuller said. People don't know much about it, and early buildings looked primitive.

Advances in papercrete are helping to make the homes look more middle-class and mainstream, he said.

The Rabons got the idea to make papercrete after Kent took a trip to Marathon and met Clyde T. Curry, the operator of Eve's Garden Organic Bed & Breakfast and Ecology Resource Center, and a longtime proponent of papercrete.

Curry began studying papercrete about eight years ago when he constructed a building, the roof of which required a truckload and a half of Ponderosa Pine. He felt that was a waste of much timber and wanted to find a better way to build.

Curry has made about 15,000 bricks since he began studying papercrete eight years ago.

Kent showed Zach one of Curry's blocks, and the younger Rabon, who had bought the Mason Ready-Mix Plant years before, immediately began looking at various formulas.

Building the blocks is basically the same as mixing cement. The ingredients are mixed together and poured into molds. The molds are dried in the sun, forming the blocks.

Mason GreenStar buys the cellulose from a Houston company, but hope to have a plant soon that will allow them to use paper recycled in Mason. The company can make 2,000 blocks a day, and there is no inventory at the plant: What they build is immediately sold.

It takes 8,000 blocks to build a 2,000 square-foot home, Kent Rabon said. Three blocks are used for every square foot, he said.

''You can sit here in the heat of the day, and it's still pretty comfortable,'' Kent Rabon said, taking a break from working on his house. ''There is a mind-set of the same thing over and over. In this part of the world, some people don't accept new ideas very well."

''But they are slowly coming around.''

http://www.sanangelostandardtimes.com/sast/news_local/article/0,1897,SAST_4956_4967589,00.html

The Marathon Chamber of Commerce is sponsoring LIVING WITH NATURE II in scenic West Texas on August 4-6, 2006.

The event will feature well-known speakers, workshops, and nature tours highlighting the theme 'Living with Nature' in ecologically sustainable ways - through eco-construction techniques, systems for self-reliant off-the-grid living, organic growing, sustainable ranching practices, small-footprint development, water conservation, landscaping with native plant species, and other arid land disciplines.

This year's eco-construction workshops will feature Zach Rabon, of Mason GreenStar Inc., who has been perfecting formulas for 'papercrete' bricks made of recycled paper and Portland cement - lightweight building materials with super-insulating properties which lend themselves to many creative applications. Together with Clyde T. Curry, proprietor of the renowned 'Eve's Garden Organic Bed and Breakfast,' Zach will demonstrate the practical and creative possibilities of this extraordinary building technique.

If you want more information, please visit the event's website here, or download the official press release below:

Living With Nature II - Press Release

The May 2006 edition of Civil Engineering Magazine features an article on papercrete. Abstract below:

The Paper Alternative
By Barry J. Fuller, the founder and executive director of Arizona State University's Center for Alternative Building Studies; Apostolos Fafitis, Ph.D., F.ASCE, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University; and Jorge L. Santamaria, a recent graduate of Arizona State with a master of science in civil and environmental engineering.

For decades intrepid environmentalists have been building homes and other structures with a material that recycles wastepaper into an alternative construction materials made with cement and other ingredients. They have claimed these 'papercrete' structures are strong, durable, and insulating - but they have had no research to back up their claims. Until now.

For more information and magazine subscriptions, please visit Civil Engineering Magazine Online

Mason man's building block seeking a market

Posted: 07/31/2005

Adolfo Pesquera
San Antonio Express-News business writer

State District Judge Sam Medina is having a hard time suppressing his enthusiasm.

A former third-world homebuilder turned Lubbock jurist, Medina left Mexico 13 years ago with an aborted dream to provide affordable housing to the poor.

A Home and Garden Television junkie, Medina thought he had seen every kind of new -age alternative building material when an acquaintance of his son, who had heard of his interest in building, started talking about a block he was developing that was made from cement and paper pulp.

"I thought, 'Nah, one more person with the magic block,'" Medina said.

The young man, Zach Rabon, 30, brought him a lumpy gray block he had trademarked as Blox© Building System. His fledgling company was MasonGreenstar.

That was a year ago. Since then, Medina has been on the phone to every contact he had kept, from the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, to Panama. Builders and government officials from across Mexico and Central America will be meeting with him next month in Mason to look at that magic block.

"Since 1992, I had never invited them to come see anything," Medina said of his Latin American business relations. "This is a super block. I don't know what Zach did to it, but goodness mercy, it could change the way we build."

Cement and paper blocks, known among aficionados as "papercrete," have been around for decades. A score of small companies, mainly in the Southwest, have been experimenting with them, but a lack of official testing data has kept the products from getting to market.

The day Medina saw the block, he asked Rabon if he could hit it.

"I took a sledgehammer to it," Medina said. "All you get is a small indentation, much like you would if you hammered a nail too many times into a piece of wood."

Medina put a blowtorch on it, expecting it would pop and crack like concrete or catch fire like wood. It did neither.

The blocks are designed to make 10-inch-thick walls that, left without a stucco finish, saturate with rainwater to one inch, then dry out unharmed. Its rated thermal value shows it insulates two to three times better than fiberglass.

"I asked to see his utility bills," Medina said of Rabon's residence, which is built with the blocks. "The largest bill I saw was $106, on a 3,300-square-foot house."

Medina describes Rabon's house as "cave-like cool," and because it is part experiment, part home, Rabon wanted to see how the interior and exterior walls would hold up without a finish. The house has the look and texture of something straight out of Fred Flintstone's Stone Age town of Bedrock.

Rabon, a Texas Tech alumnus with a degree in ecology and conservation, left Lubbock about the same time his father moved his general contracting business to Mason. There was a ready-mix plant for sale next to the city landfill, and Rabon bought it.

The young Rabon watched trucks bring trash, lamented on how his life wasn't following his university career plan and wondered how he might do something to lighten the load on those dump trucks.

It was about this time that the younger Rabon was introduced to papercrete by his father, Kent. During a vacation trip to Marathon, the elder Rabon met Clyde T. Curry, the operator of Eve's Garden Organic Bed & Breakfast and Ecology Resource Center.

Curry, 52, a tradesman from Reston, Va., who left the construction industry to build an ecovillage, was one of the earliest proponents of papercrete. The inn's Lotus Suite is built of the material.

Curry and the Rabon, 64, both builders, became friends. Rabon took one of Curry's blocks to his son, tossed it on his desk and suggested he make something with it.

For more than two years, Zach Rabon turned his ready-mix plant into a laboratory. When he was ready to start building, Rabon claimed to have a block that dried faster, shrunk less and kept a sharper edge once cured than anything his competitors were making.

Barry Fuller, who directs the government-funded research on papercrete through the Arizona State University Fulton School of Engineering Research, was impressed with Rabon's block

Fuller, who is developing his own block, has tested the compressive strength of Rabon's block. He described it as, "Superman strong, stronger than any other we tested."

The odd thing about papercrete blocks is that when put under pressure they tend not to crack like concrete, nor do they splinter and disintegrate like wood. When the cellulose fiber - the refuse of recycled newspapers, lottery tickets and phone books - is reconstituted into a block form, it takes on the strength characteristics of both base materials, but acts like a very hard sponge. It shrinks slightly under extreme pressure.

It flexes when pushed. That makes it an ideal candidate for use in earthquake-prone zones, Fuller said.

Papercrete lacks approval from the International Code Council, which has stymied its use in urban areas where building codes are stricter. Fuller is head of a subcommittee for the American Society for Testing and Materials to set standards.

Beyond establishing its structural standards, papercrete will have to overcome a bias among builders and the public. Fuller can appreciate their reluctance.

"When I first saw this," Fuller recalled, "I didn't take it real seriously. I was wondering how anything could be built that way. It seemed so primitive."

Like adobe mud bricks, papercrete mix is poured into forms that dry in the sun. When it dries, its shape is jagged and porous. Fuller realized that bumpy shape added to its strength because blocks joined with a mortar of the same mix adhered to each other better than other building materials.

There is no stucco wire required for the finish coat. Because the wall is monolithic and self-insulating, there is no need for drywall, wood studs, insulation or vapor barriers.

Rabon estimates he can build houses for 20 percent below the market rate cost of a wood frame house. Fuller goes further, estimating the savings at up to 30 percent.

San Antonio architect Steven Colley, an expert on alternative building materials, is building a shed with Rabon's papercrete to see how it will weather. It appears to be suitable for the Southwest climate, he said.

Considered on the fringe of alternative building materials, Colley said people have- been experimenting with the formula for years.

"It didn't hold up very well," Colley said. "It tended to fall apart. I'm not privy to the formula Zach uses, but it has some additives that seem to have solved a lot of those problems."

Rabon is conducting various tests through two private laboratories in San Antonio, Texas Tech and Colorado State. If the results are favorable, Colley said the time would be appropriate to try using the material on a commercial scale.

The Blox© Building System seems to be holding up well now as an infill material in the houses where it's been used, Colley said, explaining that these are the nonload-bearing portions of walls. Using it as a load-bearing material is not outside the realm of possibilities, he said, adding, "I just want to see the tests first. As an architect, my liability is on the line."

Tradesmen who have used the block like it for another reason: It is light, weighing 8 pounds for a block whose size is comparable to a 30-pound adobe block or a 40-pound compressed earth block.

"The guys love working with it," Rabon said. "It's so lightweight, it doesn't strain your back."

Its weight lowers shipping costs, too. Trucks reach maximum load on volume long before they reach their weight limits, Rabon said.

Fuller will join Curry in Marathon from Aug. 15-17 to conduct a papercrete workshop at the Big Bend Nature Festival, an environmental event sponsored by the National Park Service and Marathon Chamber of Commerce.

Meanwhile, Judge Medina is reconsidering a venture in Mexico, where he had built houses of light-gauge steel and stucco until a peso devaluation killed his business.

"It's always been in my heart to want to do more of that building, to improve this world and do it in such a way that you can stay in business," Medina said. "I'm very, very impressed with this. I'm going to get involved as much as I can with it."

apesquera@express-news.net

http://www.mysanantonio.com/business/stories/MYSA073105.1R.EcoBlox.1be33099.html