House of waste Premium

Building from waste is not toxic, says Bill Sullivan. Together with architects Vinu Daniel and Aravind Manoharan, he talks about designing homes with recyclable materials

Architects and laypersons are increasingly incorporating waste and recycled materials as part of their designs, not piecemeal but in a more holistic manner. When Bill Sullivan first came to Auroville in 1974, there was hardly any plastic to be seen. Sullivan loved the place’s peace and quiet, not to mention the rolling plains of green, and soon became an Aurovillian. But over the next few decades, all of this changed.

It started with the tetra packs, a kind of plasticised cardboard carton used to package food, drinks and a number of other products. Plastic bags became ubiquitous, distributed for free with any purchase. And the absolute worst was styrofoam, i.e., expanded polystyrene particularly used to make food containers. “I saw India going into the pit. Because once the tetra packs and plastic bags and bottles came in, they were all over the street — and cows can’t eat it, crows can’t eat it, rats can’t eat it,” recalls Bill, who soon after coming to Auroville, took the ‘ill’ out of ‘Bill,’ becoming just ‘B.’

B decided to look into the problem of waste in Auroville. He found out that they generate approximately three tonnes of landfill per month. Of this, 70% is taken care of — it’s reused, upcycled and composted. But the remaining 30% goes into the ground, polluting the earth and contaminating the water table. So B suggested that they take that 30% and use it to build houses. “What is a landfill? It’s a mix of different materials — if you put the greasy pickle in with some plastic and an old shirt, they’re unusable, but separate them, and they become a resource,” says B.

He tried to convince a lot of architects and Aurovillians to use this waste to build, but no one would. The architects couldn’t do it because clients weren’t interested; and clients didn’t want to do it because most of them were trained consumerists, who believed that waste was toxic and must be thrown away. That’s when B decided to build his own house completely out of waste and recycled materials because he wanted to prove to people that it could be done. That was the genesis of what came to be dubbed ‘Trash Mahal.’

For starters, the foundation of the house is a landfill: a hole filled with waste that was sealed shut and covered with cement mix. The walls are made from compressed earth blocks, which are a combination of subsoil, clay, sand and aggregate. The pillars holding up the house are made of wood from the African mahogany tree, which fell down during the 2014 cyclone. The roof comprises two frames of steel, welded together with strong rods to form a cage-like structure. This is covered by wire mesh on the outside, and thick tetra pack sheets on the inside. The entire roof is sprayed over with cement, to make it durable.

Each component of the house has a story, and B is only too happy to narrate it. For instance, the compressed earth blocks are rejects from a factory, which were considered too weak for use. Another interesting backstory revolves around the scores of glass bottles embedded in the walls of his house. “This area used to be a drinking zone, where lot of villagers came at night, drank and threw bottles around. I collected the bottles for two years, and put them all in my house,” says B. Other additions include the translucent door of a washing machine that serves as a window, and a set of makeshift steel blades on his roof that serve as his AC. “Even if there is no wind, the hot air rises, so these blades run all the time and keep the house cool. I’ve seen them in a lot of shops and factories in Puducherry, but never seen anyone use them in their house. Well, I did.”

The open-air bathroom behind his house is roofless, with three toilets, a shower and a sink — waste from all of which is composted. And as B says, the bathroom functions even better if it’s raining: he doesn’t have to turn on the shower at all, but can just go stand under the open sky.