Recycling Old Homes 21 Years After Collapse Of Society?

[Eclipse Now]

It's for a collapse novel I'm working on.

 

Would crushed roof tile make good gravel for roads, or would it be too sharp?

 

A super-virus sweeps across the world about 10 years from now, and then the story is set a further 21 years beyond that. So that's 21 years of nature having her way with suburban homes.

 

What would be good to recycle and scavenge, and what would be trash?

[Turtle]

clay tiles on a roof ought to last 50 years or more, though according to these folks -who sell concrete roof tiles- the supporting structure might last 30 to 40. still, that's well beyond your time frame.

 

i don't think roads would break up as much over your time scale as you may think, particularly if no one is driving on them on account of them being dead and all. gravel & dirt roads excepted of course, as the plants in 21 years would be having a field day if not a forest day. :steering: :rant: :rose: :rose: :ip:

 

how much of the population departed for their great reward? as long as the houses aren't contaminated, why not just move in to a nice one? if something is broke in your nice new house, that's what you go out to scavenge from another house.

 

one person's treasure is another's trash.

[CraigD]

Would crushed roof tile make good gravel for roads, or would it be too sharp?

When you add water to clay tile, dishes - anything glazed - that's been broken into small pieces, the clay becomes mud-like again. As the clay softens, treading on it spalls off the glaze into a nasty sort of glass splinters.

 

I've used a wire sieve to get clean clay out of broken glazed pottery, then dried, pulverized, dissolved it (a process potters call slaking), let the slurry dry, then worked it back into good clay, and made more pots out of it.

 

Though I've heard of techniques to recycle the glaze, I've never tried it. I've mixed curshed glaze splinters with new glaze to make a lumpy stuff that some folk find pretty - when you fire the new glaze, it seals the old sharp edges pretty well.

 

I've never tried any of this with roofing tiles, but the stuff seems pretty similar to glazed pottery, so I think would behave about the same.

 

Back to the original question, I don't think broken glazed tile would make good gravel, as I think it would turn into mud and sharp splinters.

 

A super-virus sweeps across the world about 10 years from now, and then the story is set a further 21 years beyond that. So that's 21 years of nature having her way with suburban homes.

I've lived in houses that nature had her way with for 25+ years. Provided their roofs stayed waterproof - no major lost shingles (where I've lived, shingles are the rule, tile rare) or full-on holes in the roof - all they need is a good cleaning to be more-or-less good as new.

 

21 years of abandonment isn't long enough to ruin a typical - even a poorly made - house. Living in a house that was abandoned for 21 years doesn't have a very post-apocalyptic feel to it, more of a moving-to-the-low-rent-part-of-town feel.

 

In a post-apocalyptic situation, I'd rather move to suburb 21 years after the dieoff than 6 months, because the human remains would be fairly completely decayed. I imagine the smell of a suburb full of the decay remains of its inhabitants would render it nearly unlivable. :esick:

 

What would be good to recycle and scavenge, and what would be trash?

As for what can be salvaged from a house, as a rule, anything that hasn't gotten wet, and quite a lot that has. My guess is that copper wire and pipes would be a popular, as it can be stripped from a house easily, and is a useful metal. This is true even in our current, pre-apocalyptic times - you have to keep a careful eye on any house left uninhabited for even a few weeks, as copper-strippers can strike with amazing speed! :(

 

i don't think roads would break up as much over your time scale as you may think, particularly if no one is driving on them on account of them being dead and all. gravel & dirt roads excepted of course, as the plants in 21 years would be having a field day if not a forest day. :steering: :rant: :rose: :rose: :ip:

How long a paved road will last has a lot to do with region and immediate environs.

 

In my childhood homeground of southern West Virginia, in wooded areas, I’ve seen 10-year old state-paved 2-lane roads with 10 foot trees and 6 inches of topsoil locatable only by their steel highway guardrail.

 

In arid places, such as California City CA, unfinished streets have sat abandoned abandoned for 50+ years, and look nearly new.

 

Places where the roads last nearly forever tend to lack water, though, so wouldn’t be high on my list of desirable post-apocalyptic real-estate. ;)

[Eclipse Now]

Hi all,

water does seem to be the main agent of nature reclaim her lost territory, doesn't it? And as we are talking Sydney, there can be plenty of water. At times. In La Nina years — so what's the climate doing 30 something years down the track and 21 years post-Virus? (Which killed 95% of the population as it was an airborne, long lived, slow to manifest but quick to spread super-virus).

 

If something is broke in your nice new house, that's what you go out to scavenge from another house.

 

Yes, of course, but here's a few complications:

 

The main thing that is 'broken' is the local supermarkets not getting topped up, so 21 years later all the tinned food is gone.

 

The fuel tankers have stopped coming in, so energy is a big issue. Scavengers with a little technical facility salvaged all the solar PV they could and localised it.

 

Early on in the piece leaders of certain villages had generated militia. One leader is genuinely psychotic — in the 'damaged empathy centre of the brain' medical sense of the word — and has ruthelessly rose to power. There's no central law and order, so might is right. Therefore the other 'tribes' have to militarise.

 

One group realised they needed to live far more locally than suburbia allows, and so given the militarisation of enemy villages converting the local concrete shopping centre into a Fort with various metal barricades and armour protecting the outside. An 'arms race' between the tribes began.

 

Given this village lives in a 'Fort', they have gradually demolished local houses for timber and parts and firewood and most of all, clear land. They started on the local park, but within a few years the more successful they were at farming, the more other locals flocked to what looked like a new centre of law and order and safety. There's always some independent whacko's trying to go it alone, out there in the 'badlands', but they're gradually getting picked off by the 'badies' and shockingly large packs of feral dogs.

 

So as the Fort grows they salvage more old homes, clean back the soil, top up the land with biochar, and gradually increase their local farmlands. And there's similar villages scattered across Sydney in various places close to reliable water and salvaging treasures.

 

They are worried about the El Nino / La Nina cycle, as a bad La Nina can generate Australian 'mega-fires'. These beasts are like slow-motion nukes that melt and blast everything in their path. So there are salvaging crews that are basically fed to go out and find the best stuff and store it in various tunnels and out-of-the-way places they have sealed off and hidden across Sydney. Like caches of treasure for future generations.

 

There are even rumours of cannibalism outside the fort.

 

Did I mention this was a children's book? :blink:

[Turtle]

one could strip asphalt shingles from roofs and melt out the asphalt to use for waterproofing, an adhesive, or other uses as below.

 

Asphalt

...

Ancient times

In the ancient Middle East, natural asphalt deposits were used for mortar between bricks and stones, to cement parts of carvings, such as eyes, into place, for ship caulking, and for waterproofing.[1] The Persian word for asphalt is moom, which is related to the English word mummy. Asphalt was also used by ancient Egyptians to embalm mummies.[1][8] In the ancient Far East, natural asphalt was slowly boiled to get rid of the higher fractions, leaving a material of higher molecular weight which is thermoplastic and when layered on objects, became quite hard upon cooling. This was used to cover objects that needed waterproofing,[1] such as scabbards and other items. Statuettes of household deities were also cast with this type of material in Japan, and probably also in China.[citation needed]

 

In North America, archaeological recovery has indicated that asphaltum was sometimes used to apply stone projectile points to a wooden shaft.[9] ,,,

[joekgamer]

I have seen bathtubs/showers that are metal. Perhaps they could be melted down for resources. How advanced are the scavengers? Do they have welding capabilities, or are they back to the Stone Age?

[Eclipse Now]

I have seen bathtubs/showers that are metal. Perhaps they could be melted down for resources. How advanced are the scavengers? Do they have welding capabilities, or are they back to the Stone Age?

 

They are quite advanced and use local energy and are very 'steampunk' as a village. They use a lot of these plans, as one guy even has enough local power to run his computers and print out an encyclopedia of open source hardware!

http://opensourceecology.org/