‘Potentiating’ Waste:

Timber Pallets as an Alternative Building System

Elif Tandogan, Tuelay Guenes, and Wes Janz, Ball State University

A workshop conducted at the Greening of the Campus V conference, BSU, Saturday, September 20, 2003

The amount of waste produced on campuses is astonishing. Within this waste material stream, timber pallets have great potential: they are already structurally sound and can be assembled in various ways. In the US, recycling timber pallets is problematic; only 1/3 are reused and as a result, many pallets finally become ‘trash’ sent to landfills. Huge mounds of pallets, collected as ‘authorized’ waste by our university, shocked the authors into action, even as we responded as citizen-architects in desperate need of alternative cheap building materials (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. ‘Authorized’ wood waste, Ball State Figure 2. Wood pallet ‘dwelling’ by author

The origin of this study was developed in fall 2002 by a graduate architecture student: it is a building system that involves pallet floors, walls, and appropriate details (see Figure 2). With that research and design exploration as our starting point (Figure 3), a workshop is proposed to ‘potentiate’ timber pallets. During the four-hour session, participants will overview the world of pallet production, usage, and type; see the pallet building system in use; build their own pallet structures, and suggest additional usages, studies, and modifications.

By proposing an alternative way to locally reutilize university waste, this workshop calls attention to the inherent capacity of pallet reuse to decrease the environmental impact of campuses. Among the additional benefits are its potential to: reduce wood resource depletion, serve as a model for the local community, and suggest additional ways to treat campus trash. In so doing, awareness about social, political, and spiritual issues related to sustainability can be generated among groups of students, faculty members, physical plant personnel, university authorities, and the local community.

Figure 3. Two pages from a report on early efforts by author to develop a timber pallet building system