Pop-Up Waste Recycling Plants

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Watershed Materials is a California-based company that has developed an incredibly sustainable method of recycling waste from excavation sites.

In real estate, projects that involve excavation are an environmental nightmare, requiring trucks to expend gas transporting the waste materials from digs to dump sites that are themselves ecologically suspect at best. Watershed Materials has developed a new system that can be set up on site at any excavation to turn the waste from the development into concrete masonry units that can be put directly back into the project.

The pop-up plant uses extremely high pressure to compress loose soil into the sustainable bricks, mimicking the geological process of lithification that takes millions of years in nature. The technology is currently being used on the Kirkham Project, an urban development comprising 445 housing units in San Francisco.