Building back blue: dredge

Long description

Concrete is everywhere. In the next 10 years we will have to build one million houses in the Netherlands, and we do not have a clue how we are going to build with sustainable, circular materials. From the pavement of our streets up to the building that we built, we use a simple yet polluting combination of sand, gravel and cement. We would like to change that. We have started to build with dredged sediments. A natural waste stream from the bottom of our rivers and canals. Every year more than 40 million cubic meters of dredge is extracted. The happy news; we can use this waste stream to pave our streets instead of importing resources from far away. Besides the gigantic waste stream of dredge there is another problem in cities. There is too much paving, the inner city of Amsterdam is paved for more than 90 percent, meaning water is not able to permeate into the ground when it rains. Our waterpassing tiles made from a waste stream are the solution for the rainwater problem in our cities. In this project, we want to research how we can market these tiles, and communicate the effects of these tiles, for and to residents of Amsterdam. In this project, we want to start investigating how to market these tiles to consumers, not just municipalities and what that entails for the design and functioning of the product. 

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