Architect and design researcher Dr. Ahmed Kamal Ali is the founder/director of the Resource-Based Design Research Lab at Texas A&M University. And he struggles with something involving his work: ""I love waste because I make use of it," he told Texas A&M Today, "but I also hate it at the same time and don't want people to produce more of it."

Dr. Ali's current interest is in finding useful, profitable applications for industrial waste. A few years ago he co-authored a paper observing that green "living" walls, which are rising in popularity, are often produced from raw materials or recycled PVC.

"Green wall systems include vines with adhesive root systems grown directly on walls (left image) modular PVC-based systems (middle) and hydroponic systems constructed from fabrics (right)."

Ali and co-author Bruce Dvorak, a professor of landscape architecture at Texas A&M, proposed to "explore if existing sheet metal by-products could be repurposed as green wall systems and provide beneficial ecosystem services." Ali, Dvorak and professor of engineering technology Jorge Alvarado oversaw a student/faculty team who worked through designs for a green wall made from galvanized sheet metal off-cuts from the automotive industry.

"Sheet metal scraps in bundles prior to fabrication at the university (left) and after fabricating (right)."

"One design was refined and was trialed for cutting using a water-jet machine and assembled with manual folding," they write. "Three hundred prism-shaped modules were attached to a vertical steel frame. Drip irrigation lines deliver water to each module. Drought tolerant plants were used to minimize irrigation water. It is estimated that compared to conventional living walls, the proposed system uses about half of the volume of water needed for irrigation."

"Southwest facing wall with 300 modules installed. Photo taken during the early morning."

The 14x18-foot frame and planters is attached to Building B of Texas A&M's Langford Architecture Center, and was deemed a success. It used up 20 tons of sheet metal waste.

"Thermal image of the wall (left) was taken with a FLIR©® camera at 15:44 hrs on August 29, 2018. The heat energy visible in the image is latent heat, as the wall has a southwest exposure and was in shade approximately two hours prior to the photo. The white circle on the left center of the thermal image locates the 29.0 °C. The planted modules include darker blue pixels on the right side of the image."

The system is modular and expandable. Texas A&M reports that "The entire wall system is designed to be easily accessible, changeable and sustainable" and that the "Planters are supported only by the law of gravity" (but frustratingly, they don't provide more detail than that).

The success or potential success of the wall aside, it's really Ali's program that sounds like the killer app:

I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.

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