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Eco Floors from Bricks, Glass… and Nails?

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Often when artisanal types approach the web, their interface still looks much more like a page in the real textured world than the usual web designed pixels and Dave Hakkens – who has come up with a delicious way to make eco flooring out of ground-up materials from demolished buildings – is no exception.

Here is the front page of his web site where he explains how you could turn demolished buildings (bricks, metal, glass and all) into new flooring (or cladding?) materials with the previous building captured and reused as new building material (just one of Dave’s many interesting ideas illustrated on his site.)

Some of the materials get ground up into a fine powder, and are used as pigmentation in a new cement base, and others are left as a loose rubble.

Although Dave is grinding and molding new slabs by hand (to illustrate the idea), this process could be mechanical – making a very efficient way of reusing old building material.

Each of these newly created slabs of ground-up materials is quite solid and heavy, as you see here. Presumably it could be molded into any shape and size that can be easily handled.

One of the most beautiful is orange brick rubble like this, but suspended in a glassy mix, as seen in this video of how he mixes the materials together.

But even roof tiles and nails make an industrial-chic object of much greater beauty than the original materials.

Instead of having to reuse whole pieces of old buildings, which is quite a labor intensive form of reuse, Dave’s method of just grinding them up wholesale could make building recycling much more automated and cheap to do.