Recycling and Upcycling

 Last week I got some advice on how to narrow the lens of my project since I knew it was still a pretty broad question and it needed more specificity.

One of the pieces of advice was to find exactly what is interesting to me, the ecological aspect of the construction or the materials alone. After some thought, I decided to first look into material and see if that was what had originally sparked my interest because all of this really goes back to affordability and what material affects affordability, or if material affects it substantially. Going back to that, the advice to focus on a single material or practice was definitely what I needed in order to move forward in my process. The first thing to do was to think about the easiest building material to use, which is concrete, and see what sort of processes one must go through to recycle concrete, how effective it is, and what effect it has on affordability.

I found quite a few different articles and links on recycling concrete and how it is cheaper and more ecological than taking the rubble to a landfill or some other waste facility. 

One of which, was a link to a site that depicted how to recycle concrete, where to recycle it, and why it is better to recycle concrete.

Concrete (cdrecycling.org)

ArchDaily even had an article on recycling concrete, on if it was possible, and on how difficult the recycling process is for concrete.

Is It Possible to Recycle Concrete? | ArchDaily

Finding these, I came to a conclusion that instead of thinking about ecological materials that are obvious forms of recycling, like the plastic bottle case study, my focus will be on recycling common building materials and its effects on affordability and, subsequently, possibly, the ecological aspects of this practice.

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