The amount of waste produced by the United States of America is astronomical. According to Duke University, 55 percent of the 220 million tons of waste produced by Americans each year ends up in landfills. And there are over 3,500 landfills throughout the country. A lot of what ends up in those landfills could have been recycled into something useful, into something that wouldn't just sit and rot for years upon so many years.
When looking for the perfect material to build refugee housing in Kosovo, architects Suzan Wines and Azin Valy went through so many different options — from tires to bottles, nothing seemed to make sense. Either they would be too difficult to separate from the waste, or too hard to construct in mass quantities very quickly. No matter how hard they thought and planned, for the longest time they simply couldn't come up with the perfect solution.
Then, one day as Wines was walking home from work, she literally tripped on a wooden pallet tossed aside as waste. Then it hit her. This would be the perfect building material.
What these two architects came up with after that is truly incredible. If their plans were put to proper use, refugees all across the globe would be able to live much better lives at a time that is already so disruptive and traumatic.
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