Ecobreves – CUBA: Eco-Materials Help Improve Housing Conditions

By IPS Correspondents and - - Reprint | | Print |

HAVANA, May 9 2011 (IPS) - Thanks to dozens of workshops now producing eco-friendly building materials in Cuba, the housing and living conditions of 3,383 families have been improved in the last year alone, according to academic sources. The eco-materials include clay bricks, concrete blocks and roof tiles manufactured with the use of organic raw materials such as sugar cane waste products, among others.

Technical specialists at the Center for Structural and Materials Research at the Central University of Las Villas, headed up by engineer Fernando Martirena, began developing this technology several years ago with the support of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the European Union and private foundations in Germany.

The Ministry of Construction has now decided to extend the use of eco-materials technology to the entire country through a program that will run until 2015, Martirena told Tierramérica.

At the same time, a project supported by the SDC, also set to run until 2015, focuses on reforestation with bamboo as a means of producing yet another environmentally friendly construction material.

At the moment there are a total of 5,990 hectares of bamboo forests with the capacity to produce 479,200 cubic meters of wood for use in housing construction annually, said Martirena.