Wall of Trash

What in the world is this you may be asking yourself. This my friends is a Bucket Wall, the creation of a man from Capitan, USA. David Bradburn, a local contractor witnessed a neighbor having a fountain built of empty 5 Gal buckets, and realized that this would be a great building product. He researched the possibilities, and found someone else building a wall with buckets and sand using a method that David thought was far to labor intensive. Recognizing that nested buckets are very tough to seperate separate he hit on this as a posssibility and began experimenting with his options.

Dabid Invented a method of stacking buckets and compressing them with some of the bucket columns hollowed out and filled with with conrete to provide points that anchor the structure to the ground. This raw bucket wall is then wrapped with a metal mesh of some kind .

In this case, David has used Chain Link Fabric recovered from a neighbors re-fencing project, but I imagine remesh, garden fence, welded or woven stucco wire would also work. This mesh ties the structure together, and provides mechanical tooth for the plaster, and reinforces it to limit cracking. Rebar is also used as horizontal reinforcement and to minimize bowing (except where desired for aesthetics) This is tied to the buckets and the mesh as the stacks are erected.

After the mesh and rebar is installed The wall is plastered using a cement or lime based plaster like a stucco base coat, or a job site mixed product. David has also experimented with Cob as a filler material, although without the straw fiber, and says that it is a very good filler, but would not try it as a finish plaster. Here is a photo of a partially plastered wall section.

After the plaster fills up to the wire mesh, the wall is finished in a manner very similar to a traditional three coat stucco system with a scratch coat, followed by a brown coat. As for the finish coat, David is waiting to finish this project before he begins his finish coat. he could use either a traditional cementious finish, or a synthetic elastomeric finish. At the is point the wall will appear very similar to a traditional Adobe wall or even concrete block.

Needless to say, this is an extremely green method of building. Not only is David not increasing his carbon footprint and resource utilization by not using newly manufactured and transported materials, he is also reducing landfill by removing a product from the waste stream. Anyone with a Background in construction can attest to the sheer volume of buckets used and thrown away on a typical project, paint, roofing tar, drywall mud, adhesives and stucco finishes just to name a few are used in immense quantities.

If these buckets could be removed from garbage everywhere and put to use, the reduction in landfill would be  huge. This first fence will remove 12,000 cubic feet of waste from local landfills.

 

Anyone interested in contributing buckets, labor or anything else, or just looking for more information, please visit David at Recycledbucketwall.com

And the finished product.

Justin Ellis

justinellis3761@gmail.com

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