Fast Company SEP 2024 / BY Nate Berg / Read original article
A new kind of building material is taking shape in a lab at the University of Michigan.
The two-story-tall, flat black panel is the kind of wall-like material that’s used to clad the exterior of buildings, which are often made of concrete or stone. It’s marbled through with eerie streaks of orange, making it look like a slab of rock quarried from some alien landscape. This slab, though, is made of melted waste plastic from the Detroit auto industry right here on Earth.
The slab is called Post Rock, and it’s a prototype of a recycled plastic building material that can dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of buildings. Now on display in an exhibition at the Craft Contemporary museum in Los Angeles, Post Rock is an attempt to reduce the building industry’s large environmental footprint by reusing the waste stream of another, completely different industry.
One industry’s waste material becomes another’s solution
The concept was developed by Meredith Miller and Thom Moran, two professors in the architecture department at the University of Michigan who have been looking at ways of using waste plastic to create new building materials since 2015. The pair were inspired by the phenomenon of plastiglomerates, or composite rocks formed in the ocean from waste plastics, sand, and other debris. Appearing both natural and unnatural, these rocks highlighted a global waste problem but also hinted at new ways waste plastic could be put to use.
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