I was reminded about papercrete at another IC website yesterday and decided to do a little more research.

To my amazement, you can even make PONDS out of papercrete.

We just got 100 lbs of sodium bentonite to waterproof the ditch with the leach rock and I’m afraid we’d literally need a ton to waterproof the pond.  Well, we haven’t even unloaded it yet, so we’ll give it a try.   The weather has sucked lately, went from too HOT to WINDY to RAIN, HAIL and COLD.

The pond is almost pure caliche and papercrete would be great to smooth the surface, fill all the cracks and build a little “planting are” in the middle for dirt for water plants.

Here’s the site with a pic of the pond:

http://www.livinginpaper.com/business.htm

And here’s the material they used to waterproof the papercrete:

http://www.ugl.com/drylokMasonry/masonryWaterproofer/powdered.php

Seems like the biggest problem with papercrete is the MIXING.  There are no commercial mixers and the mixing is most of the work.  I want to use papercrete blocks where we can’t use adobe, such as over windows and doors.

I still want as much adobe as possible for thermal mass, but papercrete is light and perfect where adobe won’t work.

I also read about papercrete with local rocks used as foundation and that is just PERFECT for us.  We’ll test that for the greenhouse.

Now if it just warms up a little, I’m ready for a few test batches.  A FOUNTAIN is the perfect test project.