Photos © CASE
In Ghana, like many tropical countries around the world, people widely use and export coconuts for their fruit, milk, and cooking oil. The husks are thrown away by the millions, leaving to waste what might instead be transformed into a multifaceted building material.
“The coconut is not just any waste product; it has a lot of great properties,” said Josh Draper, an architect and clinical professor at the Center for Architecture, Science, and Ecology (CASE,) which hosts Rensselaer’s graduate program in Built Ecologies. “The question is what if we could take it and make it into something useful and something beautiful for our buildings?'”