Seven Waste Products Being Salvaged For Your Next Construction Project
Last Updated: Apr 11, 2025One person's trash can be another person's construction material, as innovative companies worldwide find a way to divert tonnes of waste from the landfill. With a bit of ingenuity and some out-of-the-box thinking, items that would have been dumped and forgotten have found new life as insulation, flooring, walls, and more. We gathered some of the most incredible ways these environment-driven makers have reimagined discarded waste into valuable resources.
Table of Contents
- Coffee Husks Become Wall Boards for Prefab Houses in Colombia
- How Can Shredded Plastic Water Bottles Become Foam Wall Panels?
- Old Jeans Become Insulation
- How Can Wine Corks Be Transformed Into Flooring and Wall Panels?
- Natural Bark Finds New Purpose as Siding
- How is Recycled Glass Turned Into Tiles and Countertops?
- How Do Plastic Scraps Get Transformed Into Building Blocks?
Coffee Husks Become Wall Boards for Prefab Houses in Colombia
When coffee beans are roasted, the thin membrane comes off the bean. These discarded piles of coffee husks eventually produce methane, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. However, Woodpecker, a Bogota-based company, discovered that the husks can be transformed into a lightweight yet durable construction material when combined with recycled plastic.
Developed ten years ago, Woodpecker has been incorporating coffee husk fibers to make wallboards. They click together onto steel frames to build prefab houses and schools in remote rural areas of Colombia. Because the country is one of the world's leading coffee-producing companies, these raw materials are readily available.
Once the husks are processed with recycled plastic, the resulting construction material is insect-resistant, affordable, durable, and fireproof – offering the perfect housing solution.
How Can Shredded Plastic Water Bottles Become Foam Wall Panels?
Instead of languishing forever in a giant landfill or the ocean, a construction company is putting millions of plastic water bottles to better use as high-performing building materials for houses and decks. Based in Nova Scotia on Canada's East Coast, JD Composite's structural insulated panels are built with a foam core material consisting of recycled plastic bottles bonded with specialized laminates.
First, Ontario-based company Armacell processes the bottles: After shredding and heating the plastic into small pellets, it is treated with gases and melted into foam. Once it's cool, the hardened foam gets a fiberglass coating, followed by UV-resistant paint. The foam panels then form insulating 5.9-inch-thick walls.
The company recently built a 2,000-square-foot beach house using 620,000 recycled plastic bottles. Not only was it made to withstand Nova Scotia's gale-force winds, but the home is energy-efficient and affordable.
Old Jeans Become Insulation
Natural fibers can make high-performance insulation. Manufacturers have been providing scraps of denim to make insulation for residential and commercial projects, rather than ditching these remnants in the garbage. Old cotton jeans can be used instead of fiberglass or wool between wall studs and ceiling joists, in attics, and anywhere else traditional insulation is applied.
Creating this type of insulation requires much less energy than the fiberglass variety. The denim bits are shredded into loose fibers and treated with a non-toxic, EPA-approved borate solution to improve its fire-resistance rating. It also gets treated to resist mold, mildew, and insects.
Denim scrap insulation offers excellent thermal performance, boosting HVAC efficiency and saving energy, too. You can purchase it in several R-values and sizes to fit snugly into different areas of the home.
While using recycled jeans insulation can be double the cost of fiberglass, this type of insulation provides higher acoustic ratings than traditional products.
The recycled fibers do not off-gas because they do not contain any volatile organic compounds or formaldehyde. At the end of the insulation's natural lifespan, the cotton fibers are then 100% recyclable.
Bonded Logic, a company in Arizona, uses shredded denim to make insulation containing 80% post-consumer recycled natural fibers. The product is packaged into perforated batts, which makes installation more manageable – you tear off only the amount you need.
You can even make your own insulation with a pile of old denim if you have small areas in your home that need a little draft protection. Keep in mind - given the DIY nature of this project, results will vary widely!
Natural Bark Finds New Purpose as Siding
Working with loggers in the plywood and furniture industries, Asheville, NC-based BarkClad, wants to be sure every part of a tree gets put to good use instead of being tossed into a chipper. The company uses trees that were already cut down for other projects and repurposes the bark into wood siding for both interior and exterior applications for homes across North America.
Wendy Helfenbaum
Wendy Helfenbaum is a Montreal-based journalist and TV producer whose work has appeared in many outlets including Apartment Therapy, Metropolis, Architectural Digest’s AD Pro, AARP, Costco Connection, Country Gardens, Realtor.com, Style at Home, Canadian Living and many more. Follow her @WendyHelfenbaum
