The floor is made of cardboard, the walls are made of cardboard, the ceiling is made of cardboard… In Brest, the social landlord BMH is building six houses from recycled cardboard, a first in France in the field of social housing.
“We are quite satisfied to be the first social landlord in France to make this type of cardboard house, even if the term can make you smile,” says Georges Bellour, general director of Brest métropole habitat (BMH). “In any case, I don’t know if he makes you smile, but he gets people talking a lot, that’s for sure.”
Aligned in the middle of a residential area of the Breton port, the six houses, still under construction, would go almost unnoticed if their construction material was not so unusual.
“When we studied this project, there were concrete slabs and walls between each dwelling. We showed that we could go further than that and build with zero concrete,” explains Alain Marboeuf, president of the Bat’Ipac company. , at the origin of the cardboard construction process.
Apart from a wooden skeleton and metal stakes to anchor the house to the ground, almost everything is made of cardboard: from the floors to the ceiling to the walls.
The self-supporting panels, which form the bulk of the structure, are made up of several plates of recycled cardboard sheets, glued to each other, and covered with a waterproof membrane. It is therefore necessary to count 5 tonnes of cardboard per house.
A “healthy product”, good thermal and acoustic insulation, which generates 72% fewer greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional construction (in concrete blocks and mineral wool), according to Mr. Marboeuf.
A significant asset as the building sector generates 23% of French greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Ministry of Ecological Transition. Cement and concrete alone represent 8% of global CO2 emissions.
– Parcels in the walls –
With the explosion of online commerce, the recycled cardboard resource is not likely to run out. “These are all these packages which end up in our yellow bins and which we will recover so that we can make cardboard blocks again,” describes the business manager. “And there, you find them in your walls, in your floors, in your roofs.”
Manufactured by insertion structures, the cardboard panels are recyclable “nine times” and even have the advantage of storing carbon “in the form of cellulose”, he adds.
Storm Ciaran, which caused a lot of damage in Brest with winds of 156 km/h, did not take away these houses, which one might believe to be more vulnerable than others. “It’s a certain form of demonstration of the solidity of this type of building. The walls did not collapse. So it’s a bit of an absurd demonstration of the quality of the product,” points out Mr. Bellour.
Fixed on piles 30 cm from the ground, without a concrete slab, the houses even let rainwater infiltrate into the ground, in order to avoid saturation of the rainwater network.
A little more expensive than a conventional construction a few years ago, the price of the cardboard house is now “equivalent” due to inflation in the cost of raw materials, according to Mr. Marboeuf, who puts forward a range of “1,500 to 2,600 euros/m2” depending on the type of building.
The Brest houses must be completed in April 2024.
© 2023 AFP
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