Soil Health and Design Research based on La Yeguada’s waste streams
regenerative and circular design
This is an alternative exploration for the application of La Yeguada’s main waste streams: banana plantations and pine panel construction.
La Yeguada is a town in neighboring industry for pine crate production with local pine in Panama. This process creates an excess waste of pine shavings.
Parameters of the project narrow opportunities through circumstantial availability for the residents of La Yeguada. These include: diverse sizes of pine residue, access to manufacturing processes and resources.
materials and resources available to La Yeguada
bandsaw, table saw, chop saw, sanders
caribbean pine, bananas, corn
I turned to researching local compound additives and create molds to compress-shaping products.
exploring the possibilities of what pine could become in a practical or aesthetic capacity
Chair
legs and or seat
Paper
pages and book cover
Plates and Bowls
hold dry objects only
Lamp
bowls or two piece molds
packaging
two piece molds and x object
after multiple plays and takes on combinations between pine shavings, dextrin, paper pulp, hibiscus flowers, sodium alginate, calcium carbonate and sawdust: I built a recipe that allowed organic material to be “glued” together, biodegradable-y.
- bam -
scraps and pieces of food and organic matter were chopped, blended, dried to become a building block pulp.
A slow and steady process that can be scaled to an individual to mass production. Drying out and repurposing and reintegrating organic material is vital to the health of our soil, global food systems and climate solutions.
Rather than using ovens you could implement sun ovens with aluminum and it would be significantly slow down the process but work just as well. This or incorporating green energy would lower the impact of energy consumption.
A perfect housing for a future seed.
It can be used for housing a seed to easily spread and throw through fields of harvested pines to regrow. It can be used as well to easily manually spread natural fertilizer and support plant growth and soil health.
This material includes pine, starch and banana.
Both banana and starch act as natural fertilizers. Pine provides structure and insulation.
“The unit of survival is organism plus environment” - Anthropologist Gregory Bateson - In this view soil is the other half of the seeds, the organism plus, the context in which they come alive and reproduce the locus of their survival and the determination of their potential. Soil is another part of the commons we have all inherited but it is rapidly being destroyed, eroded, depleted, and not replenished. ” - Claire Pentecost, Soil-erg 2012
A bio-material from waste, that creates no waste and nurtures soil & new seedlings for reforestation of pine forests in Panama.
A seed housed in soil.
Set to grow wherever it stows.
Making a chair leg out of the recipe was challenging for the design and mold -
The square sample was a tough building block and withhold its shape throughout strength testing.
Changing the design to something less narrow will provide material structural reliance for the design when compressed,
