Rooftop Gardens with Domestic Recycled Materials

So you demonstrated it’s possible to make protection (the pagoda) and food (the composting and growing) out of free material (trash). I like that project! Because it’s very close to “big vision” we have for OpenVillage here at Edgeryders, namely that building a good life is possible (1) in do-it-yourself manner, (2) for free, and (3) while sharing the knowledge freely. Let’s see how far we can get on the way there!

Reading your description, a few connections to other “free and open source” work come to mind. Maybe you know them, maybe you can find an inspiration:

  • vocativ TrussFab: A software to design all kinds of objects to be made from PET bottles and 3D-printed connectors. They show a “half geodesic dome” structure made with that technique later in the video, which seems closest to a pagoda in function.

  • Precious Plastic: A “DIY industrial” toolkit for recycling plastic. With their compressor machine plans you could build a machine for making roof shingles out of waste plastic.

  • Soil Maker: A machine, or just a set of “recipes”, to take all kinds of ingredients like compost, different soils, sand, wood chips, biochar, clay etc. and analyze, grind, mix and cure them into different types of high-quality soils, as needed by different plants. Would be nice to have, as it would encapsulate the task of making soil – which is difficult, as you experienced. Could even become a business idea when done on a larger scale.

The soil maker is just an idea I once had. Which should not mean much, because my expertise in agricultural processing is limited to shelling green coffee beans in hilarious ways :laughing:

(P.S.: Hope you don’t mind I fixed your article’s formatting a bit while reading … “admin habit”. See here for some hints for writing in Arabic script on this platform ­– we could not made it work perfectly yet, but it’s already quite comfortable, I hope.)

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