A $60,750 House Made of Garbage.” Reynolds Aluminum Tests Recycling as Architecture in Henrico

America in 1973 was a place of shortages, and the word was used over and over to describe the economic and societal condition of the country. The headline on the first page of a Richmond Times-Dispatch from December read, “’Brother, There’s No Shortage of Shortages,”’ and it was on everyone’s mind. Everything from nurses to boxcars were in short supply, as was cotton for clothes. “Nothing is more common than food and clothing,” the Times-Dispatch noted glumly, “…and that might prove to be the biggest crunch of all.”

It was the dwindling flow of crude oil that proved to be the most damaging shortage. The winter of 1973-1974 saw the oil embargo of the United States because of support for Israel during the Yom Kippur war. That lack of the supply of energy affected American industry across the board, reducing stocks of gasoline and heating oil but also crippling the manufacture of industrial products – including building supplies. Not only were building materials more expensive to produce, but transportation of these items became more difficult.

In the face of the lack of resources, the government and the public both became gradually aware of the potential for recycling and the economic savings that could result. This is especially true of aluminum. To produce one pound of aluminum from ore required more than six pounds of coal, but to produce the same amount of aluminum from scrap cost less than a quarter of a pound. Among the enthusiasts for recycling aluminum was Richmond’s Reynolds Metals Corporation, which pioneered recycling aluminum beginning in 1967 and operated twelve aluminum recycling plants across the country.  The company opened a new facility in Williamsburg in 1973 which was projected to recycle 450 million cans.

 

A publicity photo of the house at 101000 Cherrywood Road in Henrico County. It was built by Reynolds Metals in 1973 as a demonstration of how using recycled materials was both practical and affordable.

 

Reynolds was anxious to develop a market for the metal as a building material that was strong, lightweight, and could be produced by reusing aluminum products. The company’s competitor, Alcoa Aluminum, had already built a demonstration house in Richmond in 1958 that showcased the extensive use of aluminum as a building material.

 

See the Shockoe Examiner’s examination of this astonishing mid-century home HERE.

 

The Alcoa model home emphasized the unique properties of aluminum, but in contrast, Reynolds wanted to demonstrate how a full range of recycled materials could be incorporated into a modern home. The Alcoa house, with its hyper-modern and colorful appearance, promised a “carefree” lifestyle, but the Reynolds building is carefully designed to blend in and, from the street, intended to be indistinguishable from hundreds of other tri-levels in Richmond. On August 24, 1973, the house on Cherrywood Drive was opened to the public for tours.

 

A cutaway view showing the location of various recycled building materials in the 1973 Reynolds demonstration house.

 

Reynolds said that the scrap aluminum that went into framing the house, the joists, siding, windows, and gutters were the equivalent of 183,500 beverage cans and that 8.5 tons of newspaper went into the subflooring, sheathing, roof deck, and paneling. The driveway was made of a slurry of shredded rubber tires and crushed glass, and glass was also used as foundation fill and footings. The carpet was recycled nylon fiber and the pipes were recycled cast iron. What appeared to be conventional bricks on the exterior were actually a mixture of crushed glass and quarry tailings. Robert Testin, director of environmental planning for Reynolds, said in an interview the only components of the house not made with reused waste material were the window glass, the hardwood steps and trim, plasterboard, and a few sheets of plywood.

By the end of October 1973, the tours were discontinued and the house was put on the market for sale. The New York Times, ever eager for an eye-catching headline, wrote about the house Reynolds built in Richmond, calling it “A $60,750 House Made of Garbage.” Despite that sensational title, the article had to admit that the home is “indistinguishable from any other suburban house, even though it is the first to be constructed almost entirely from recycled materials.”

 

The Reynolds Metals Corporation’s “recycled house” as it appears today.

 

For its utterly unique combination of elements, the Reynolds house still looked just like any other tri-level of that type. Indeed, even people living in it were unaware of the house’s unusual history. Twenty years ago, a writer for “Waste 360,” a website that serves the recycling industry, revisited Richmond’s Reynolds Metals house. “The homeowner I chatted with had no idea that her house was made from recycled products,” wrote John Wilford. “To her, it was just home. She remembered that the neighbors said there was some kind of fuss over the house when it was built, but they couldn’t exactly remember what it was.”

There is no record of another test house like this having been constructed, although many recycled aluminum building materials like siding became common in America’s rush to the rapidly growing suburbs. The fact that the recycled house was completely indistinguishable, even for the people occupying it, from any other suburban Richmond home is the real triumph of this exercise in the reuse of resources. In contrast to the Alcoa home, with its attention-grabbing purple anodized aluminum panels and revolutionary, open design, the ordinariness of the Reynolds house has meant it fits in seamlessly with other houses in the West End. Submerging into that unremarkable streetscape confirmed that houses “made of garbage” could and do serve their occupants well, and in the case of the Reynolds “recycled house” has done so for fifty years.

 

-Selden