Jakarta Globe, Paula Carrillo, Mar 31, 2015
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| View of houses made with tires in Choachi, Cundinamarca, Colombia on March 16, 2015. In the same way as igloos, thermally efficient and resistant to quakes, a particular kind of house in central Colombia takes advantage of a material which is thrown away: tires. 5.3 million tires are thrown away each year in Colombia, and since they take millions of years in decomposing, using them for building becomes a potential. (AFP Photo/Eitan Abramovich) |
Choachí,
Colombia. The highlands around the Colombian capital are scattered with small
buildings that look like out-of-place igloos but are in fact innovative houses
made from the tires that litter the country’s roads.
The woman
behind the project is Alexandra Posada, a 35-year-old environmental activist
who sports a cowboy hat and jeans while she works, her buff biceps rippling in
her tank top as she slings around old tires and shovels them full of dirt.
“I get
these tires for free because it’s a huge problem for people to get rid of
them,” she told AFP.
“They take
thousands of years to decompose — which we’ve transformed from a problem into
an opportunity,” she said. “If you use them as construction materials, they
become virtually eternal bricks.”
Posada is
currently at work on several houses in the mountains of Choachi, a city of
about 15,000 people an hour’s drive east of Bogota.
She and her
team take truckfuls of old tires and fill them with earth, turning them into
massive bricks that weigh 200 to 300 kilograms each.
Using a
range of tires from semi trucks to cars, they stack them together around iron
bars to create round structures that are at once solid and flexible — well
insulated against the heat and cold, but also rubbery enough to withstand the
earthquakes common in this seismically active Andes region.
The houses
have rounded cement-and-steel ceilings over the bedrooms and kitchen, and flat
wood-plank ceilings over the living room and dining room.
Both are
covered by another layer of tires, making “an almost non-degradable,
impermeable” roof, said Posada.
The houses
may be made from waste, but they have a captivating beauty.
The
sweeping curves of the roofs are often painted in bright colors.
The walls
are covered with tan mortar made of lime and sand, giving them a smooth adobe
look interrupted by flashes of color from old glass bottles inserted in the
masonry.
Posada also
uses glass bottles to make skylights in the bedrooms, inserting them vertically
in the concrete ceilings to create a pixelated stained-glass effect.
“These
houses are made with reused materials, but they’re also beautiful, airy, with
more indirect light,” she said.
Millions of
tires
It is an
ingenious solution to a tricky problem.
Colombians
throw out more than 5.3 million tires a year, according to official figures —
nearly 100,000 metric tons of rubber that pollute the environment.
They often
end up abandoned in unsightly piles along the country’s roads, or are burned to
get rid of them, adding their acrid smell to the clouds of car exhaust that
often choke Bogota, a sprawling city of more than seven million people.
“It’s a
huge problem in terms of the public space, the environment and the landscape,”
said Francisco Gomez, who heads the environment ministry’s response to the
issue.
Tire
manufacturers and importers in Colombia are only required to recycle about 35
percent of the country’s total consumption.
And
sanitation workers are not responsible for removing abandoned tires because
they are considered “special waste.”
“The
response we’ve been able to implement is pretty small in terms of the quantity
of waste being generated,” said Gomez.
Posada has
so far used about 9,000 old tires to make the walls, roofs, terraces and steps
of her rubber “igloos.”
One of her
workers, William Clavijo, a 57-year-old mason, said the job has taught him a
lesson in “valuing things.”
“People
usually just throw this stuff away. Now you see that it can be put to good
use,” he said as he slapped layers of mortar across a wall of tires, hiding its
past as rubbery waste abandoned on the streets of Bogota.
Agence France-Presse
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