Old cars, used paper become ... homes?

If the housing industry ever springs to life again, two US firms are poised to join the revival using unconventional building materials: junked cars and post-consumer paper.

Featured in a recent edition of The Oregonian, Miranda Homes takes an engineering — rather than architectural — approach toward housing design. Why?

“The reason is that engineering plans are much more detailed,” the firm’s Website states. “For instance, we are able to see where plumbing may conflict with heating ducts and resolve those issues in the planning stages rather than on the jobsite.”

And how do junked cars fit into the design? Miranda’s home feature an all-steel frame made of 100-percent recycled materials … like the kind of metal that comes from old cars. (Could be one way to cannibalize all those unsold cars clogging up lots and ports around the globe.)

Meanwhile, Dexigner today features an article about KlipTech, a company that’s “committed to researching, developing, designing, and manufacturing the most durable, cost effective, user and environmentally friendly products in the world,” according to founder/president Joel Klippert. Those products include EcoClad, an exterior cladding material, and EcoTop, which can be used to surface everything from countertops to skateboarding ramps …. all  made from bamboo and post-consumer paper materials.

“When EcoClad creators had the idea of covering buildings with recycled paper in the late ’90s, people thought the idea was crazy,” the company’s site states.

Apparently, it was a lot less crazy an idea than, say, real-estate speculation and securitised sub-prime mortgages.