Courtesy: Rolex Awards

Heart of South America. Paraguay. A landlocked country. 300,000 families do not have adequate housing. One Social activist, Elsa Zaldivar, found an innovative way of recycling old vegetables - to make homes.

She found a creative way to mix loofa, a cucumber-like vegetable, with husks from corn and caranday palm along with recycled plastic to build panels. These are then used to construct furniture and lightweight houses.

Loofah can be eaten before it ripens. But Elsa let the plant ripen and dry out. Then she processes it until only a firbrous sponge remains. She organized local women to form a cooperative. They sell their loofah sponges as cosmetic products. Loofah is used to manufacture mats, slippers, insoles and a variety of other products that were mostly exported to developed markets worldwide.

Elsa was not satisfied. She teamed up with an industrial engineer, Pedro Padrós, to build a machine that melted a mixture of recycled plastic and combine with loofa and other vegetable fibres. After hundreds of failures, they built a machine to produce the panels.

Using a honeycomb or earthen filler these panels can be sandwiched into high strength door, wall, and roof composite materials.

Timber is fast depleting across South America. Elsa's innovation could well be the start of a new wave of sectional homes using renewable materials.

Elsa recently won the prestigious Rolex Awards.

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I Am New,
Krish Murali Eswar.