Floating Homes Made From Coffee Cups with Green Walls
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 09.11.08
Since 2000, about thirty floating homes have been built out RexWall, a composite fiberglass panel; we have shown a few of them on TreeHugger. Now Michel Kreuger of Amsterdam's Studio Noach has put together a team with Kohler Prize winning architect Anne Holtrop and Le Mur Vegetal inventor Patrick Blanc to build the ultimate floating home that is green in so many ways. The clincher: the Rexwall panel is made of recycled polystyrene hamburger clamshells, coffee cups and packing material. Kreuger calls it "the sustainable solution to packaging pollution."
The Design by Anne Holtrop
Originally developed for a site in the Netherlands, Anne Holtrop describes it as "a project to investigate possibilities for living on water. In this study we establish a strong link between the landscape and the houses, which are laid out along an extensive, curving path.
The houses are fully covered with vegetation. Mineral-rich water will be pumped out of the lake for the plants. A planting scheme has been developed in collaboration with botanist Patrick Blanc. The effect of the plants will be double. First, they will make the houses look like green hills floating on the water. This underscores the idea of the landscape approach. Second, the plants produce oxygen, compensating for the CO2 produced when the houses are manufactured.
The design of the house merely consists of an overemphasized structure. This leaves possibilities for use open, yet is characteristic enough to define places within it. More from Anne Holtrop
The structure and concept
Michel Kreuger tells us that the Rexwall panels with recycled polystyrene cores will result in the following benefits:
-100% Recycled
-High insulation
-Frost impervious: because it is flexible, ice freezup around the hull is not a problem.
He claims that the floating houses address four environmental issues:
-CO2/Greenhouse issue
‘Green Floating' objects turn CO2 straight into oxygen, they love it! Bottom line even more then owners and users of the resort expel altogether. 'Green Floating' resorts are CO2 negative.
-The population issue
If you watch the globe, how colourful the continents may be, 70% of our planet is blue and full of water. Lots of water. In total 1370 km3
The Environmental Waste Issue:
"EPS, or expanded polystyrene is one of the most tough waste materials on our planet. On average it takes up to 90 years to biodegrade a polystyrene coffee cup or hamburger shell. However, the product is easy to recycle. In RexwallTM it even serves the planet."
The Energy Issue:
"Fossil fuels are running out at high speed. Energy prices go through the roof. RexwallTM is one of the best insulating building materials available. In combination with our climate system (that uses the amount of energy as an ordinary fridge to heat an entire villa) energy savings are up to 70%!"
North American Availability: Anticipated in 2009 from ::Studio Noach
More on Patrick Blanc in TreeHugger:
Madrid Gets a Vertical Garden Too
A Really Green Building: Quai Branley Office Wing
Design in The New York Times
Azure: The Green Issue
More on Floating Homes in TreeHugger:
Floating Eco- Homes In The Netherlands : TreeHugger
Villa Näckros: Swedish Floating Prefabs
Living With Water Extremes: A Juxtaposition Of Design Responses ...
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
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It would be awfully hard to sleep during a storm of any kind at all. Your whole house would be rocking and shaking. You would have to have everything secured down, I would think, to a degree us landlubbers don't have to. I don't think it's any sort of mass solution, but for people willing to do it (and there probably is a market), they would have less of an impact.
It would really suck to drop your groceries into the lake, though.
@BradyDale:
People have been living on house boats for years. I don't see that this would be significantly more difficult than that.
Do these kinds of houses have grid connections? How would that work? Clearly energy and water and be had on-site, but how will I read TH without my precious internet?
Also:
"If you watch the globe, how colourful the continents may be, 70% of our planet is blue and full of water. Lots of water. In total 1370 km3"
This clearly refers to water in the oceans, but in that case 1370 km^3 is off by 5 to 6 orders of magnitude. Different websites claim different "average depths" for the oceans, but a reasonable estimate of their volume would be between 300 million and 1.4 billion cubic kilometers.
Mankind already uses several thousand km^3 of freshwater annually, and we clearly aren't emptying the oceans several times a year.
this actually seems like a pretty good idea... for a lake. i've thought that since seeing Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. great movie.
Is the polystyrene from post-consumer waste?
LA: That'w what the man says.
Why not just live on a boat?
Fine if you live IN this structure, but unfortunate to have to look at this floating around in the lake if you live in a house on the shore. For such an organic theme, it sure is boxy. Also, you can't really live on the ocean with this because the salt water will kill the plants.