Photos and Article by Mary Alice Murphy
Building a ChipCrete wall 071815
Building a ChipCrete wall 071815
Gordon West, the idea man behind ChipCrete, mixes the binder for the wood chips.
Building a ChipCrete wall 071815
West pours the binder into the mixer full of wood chips.
Building a ChipCrete wall 071815
The mixer at work
Building a ChipCrete wall 071815
Bill Knauss developed PaperCrete with a friend. Now he works on biochar with West.
Building a ChipCrete wall 071815
West and Knauss pour the ChipCrete into the wall forms.
Building a ChipCrete wall 071815
Denise Smith of the Office of Sustainability, where the wall is being built, tamps the mixture into the forms, as others look on.
Gordon West of Gila Woodnet is the idea man behind ChipCrete, which is made of wood chips and a binder, which his step-daughter, a chemist, helped him refine.
The Office of Sustainability is building a small enclosure in front of the office and underneath a canopy, which mimics a forest. The first wall installed was an adobe wall, with help from Mule Creek Adobe and a lot of volunteers.
This is the second phase of the operation, with the construction of a ChipCrete wall on the opposite side from the adobe wall. Saturday, July 18, 2015, saw the creation of the wall. On Saturday, July 25, a layer of lime stucco will be put on the outside of the wall.
"This is the first time in the history of the universe this trick has been tried," West told the Beat.
One of the helpers of the morning was Bill Knauss, who created, with a friend, Papercrete and built a house out of it on Vancouver Island.
"I am now working with Gordon on biochar," Knauss told the Beat. "It's what I'm more interested in." He explained that biochar pockets were found in the Amazon Basin. The black earth was very fertile and supported dense populations of people along the river. It's basically charcoal, which is intended to be put back into the soil, and he said it lasts for thousands of years. The biochar is inert, but has tiny pockets that hold bacteria and fungi. It also has electrical properties that keep nitrates from leaching out, he said. The bacteria and fungi provide the nutrients for the plant, and the plants return the nutrients to the biochar, so it is carbon negative. If it decomposes or burns, it's carbon neutral. "It's the only carbon sequestration that really works," Knauss said.
He told the Beat the best source for biochar information is the Biochar Journal.
He said he is working with Border Partners in Palomas, but they need funding help. "I'm not getting any younger. We need some 'young Turks' to get things done."