Deep in heart of Latin America, in the country of Paraguay, a lone struggler tries to improve the life of the unfortunate people by her innovative accomplishments.
Elsa Zaldivar, an innovative social activist, has given a new hope to the Paraguayans by blending technology with ecology. It was Elsa’s efforts that made it possible to construct houses with cheap and environment friendly housing panels.
Elsa Zalvidar was instrumental to mix loofah – a vegetable similar to cucumber which is dried to produce a rough sponge, to be used as a skin scrubber – along with other vegetable materials such as husks of caranday palm trees and corn and recycled plastic, to produce lightweight and strong panels. These panels can be used to construct houses and furniture and also provide insulation against temperature and noise. The invention has proved to be a blessing for the 30,000 Paraguayan families who struggle with inadequate housing facilities.
Elsa Zalvidar teamed up with an industrial engineer, named Pedro Pardos, for searching new methods to use the excessive vegetable material. They wanted to use this vegetation to create low-priced panels to build roofs and walls of houses. Their first attempt was to try to mix the loofah with different types of glues; but this experiment didn’t give the desired results, mostly because of the steep prices involved.
Pardos then got an idea to mix the loofah with plastic waste. He invented a machine which melted a combination of 3 types of recycled plastic and mixed the resulting liquid with the loofah and some other vegetable fibres like chopped corn husks and cotton netting. After hundreds of repeated efforts, it started to produce a working product. The panels were created by the combination of a mixer, melting unit, cutting unit and extruder, to produce a half meter wide and 120 meters long panel, in merely an hour.
Depending on the various construction needs, the exact mix of the materials can be varied to produce panels with different weights, insulating qualities and flexibility. Also, colors can be added to the panel’s plastic mixture during the fabrication; so, there is no need of painting the walls after construction, cutting back the homeowners money and time. The best thing about the panel is that it saves the use of wood, thus, saving the cutting down of forests. According to Padros, the panels are designed in such a way that they will not produce any waste even if they break or are worn out. They can simply be recycled into new panels, thus helping the environment immensely.
his technological invention was created due to the exceptional combination of Elsa Zalvidar’s genius and passion and Pedro Pardos’s engineering skills and intelligence. Together, they have created an integrated system of production, cultivation, distribution and recycling, which has become a boon for the Paraguayans and will, in future, be helpful for people around the globe.
