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Excess Heights Housing Plan Provides Powerful Incentives to Reduce Waste

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Imagine if all the garbage you have ever thrown away was stacked forever in a growing pile, under your house. How high would that pile be? How high in the air would your house have to be if everything you ever tossed was compacted underneath?

This radical housing concept from Reality Cues is designed to make you think twice about throwing anything “away” – because with seven billion of us now, there really is no such place…

Following the city council’s new recommendation, a new waste management initiative will apply powerful pressure to get people to reduce waste in the neighborhood of Excess Heights.

Only recycling will get picked up. All organic waste is to be composted on-site. That isn’t so hard. The hard part is the non-recyclables. These must all be compacted on site and every last item will remain with you on-site in perpetuity, gradually filling a cube under your house.

Essentially each house has its own dump. Underneath. Once one unit is filled, your house is hoisted up on top of another cube to fill.

To conceal the hideous and growing pile of compacted uncompostable material like broken old toasters and microwaves under the house, a mesh wall surrounds the cube, on which to grow a green wall – using the compostable garbage to make the good earth.

What an incentive to compost!  Compost actually doesn’t smell, as long as it is returned to the earth.  People don’t realize this until they begin to compost. They imagine that garbage is naturally smelly.

Only if compostable organic matter is tossed in with unsorted items made of paper and plastic and metal – so it is open to air – it is unable to decompose naturally back into earth and become new life, then it does stink, the way that unsorted garbage does at the dump.

It is a radical and brilliant plan. But one “perverse incentive” may ruin it. The worse your pile of trash gets; the higher your house becomes – and the better the view becomes!

Via Arch Daily