Waste Wizard

How a new kind of brick helped pave the way for sustainable architecture by Carson Chan

- Carson Chan

IN HIS OWN TELLING, American architect Michael Reynolds had the revelation in 1970 after watching Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News. "They were talking about beer and soda cans being thrown all over the countryside,' he notes in Journey: Part One (2008). "They predicted a garbage problem in the future.

The same broadcast reported on the clearcutting of a forest in the Pacific Northwest for timber to meet housing demands. "What if we used what society discards, thought Reynolds, "to make the things we need?" American popular discourse in the United States had primed Reynolds for this breakthrough. News stories throughout the 1960s exposed the nuclear fallout in the American Midwest from weapons-testing, the rivers and lakes filling with industrial pollutants and the major cities blanketed in thick, noxious smog.

Concern for the environment crescendoed and, on the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970, 20 million people across the US attended rallies, teach-ins and marches.

Reynolds graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1969, at the crests of the anti-war, civil-rights and environmental movements.