Homes built with clay, grass, plastic and glass: How a Caribbean island is shying away from concrete

Photo Credit: Damar Ali. Retrieved from bbc.com

On the island of Trinidad, houses are being built using upcycled materials to make them more climate resilient.

When Erle Rahaman-Noronha decided to try his hand at farming in 1997, the land he settled on in Freeport, like much of Trinidad’s farmland, had been focused on monoculture – a remnant of the colonial plantations that scarred the region’s history.

“There was just a citrus tree every 20ft (6m) – none of these big trees were here,” he says, gesturing around him. Now the 30 acres (12 hectares) more closely resembles a forest, dotted with structures built out of repurposed materials.

Rahaman-Noronha hasn’t just reforested his land; he is passionate about ensuring the buildings on his farm are sustainable too. As you enter the farm a concrete house greets you – one of the older buildings on the land. But every other structure has touches of the earth. Clay, harvested from the land nearby; timber from the trees further back on the farm; repurposed glass bottles of all colours that glitter as the light hits them; rounded formations that only hint at the old, upcycled tires buried underneath to provide structure; and textured walls containing patchworks of dried grasses.

The farmer is embracing the old Trinidadian ways of building, when residents would use what was available to them, rather than mass importing materials. Not only is he putting waste products that would otherwise end up in landfill to use, Rahaman-Noronha is employing building styles that provide resilience against the island’s changing climate.