Can 3D printing solve the global housing crisis?

DW (English)

3D printing technology is redefining how homes are built. In rural Colorado, a modular robot prints multi-story houses in days, instead of weeks. But can this technology scale fast enough to meet global demand?

Transcript

00:00Not brick by brick or stone by stone, but rather layer by layer.

00:063D printing as opposed to conventional construction.

00:12What you're seeing behind me is a bought to 3D printer technology,

00:16along with our material delivery system and our advanced house management system.

00:20And this machine is able to 3D print multi-story buildings.

00:25So not only one floor, but two floors.

00:28So in construction, sometimes you have different lots, different size of lots.

00:34And the machine, it's made out of modules.

00:36So it can expand and it can also shrink to accommodate whatever your land is.

00:43The hope is that technology like this could help tackle not just the shortage of affordable homes,

00:48but also the shortage of resilient homes.

00:51But it's a delicate process.

00:52Our batch plant that's almost 250 feet of hose away is mixing concrete

00:57and then that's going into our concrete pump.

01:00And then that has to come through all of our hoses and get to here.

01:02And we have a very narrow window where that concrete needs to stiffen up enough

01:08for it to support the next layer.

01:10Our operators are changing different amounts of plasticizer or internal cure or accelerant,

01:14depending on the day.

01:16And then depending on the weather, the UV, the temperature, the wind,

01:19those are all going to play a factor in how quickly that concrete is going to harden.

01:23On the bad side is if we miss that window and the concrete is either too fast or something goes

01:29wrong and we're too slow.

01:30Now we have all this 250 feet of concrete in the hose that we have to make sure it doesn't harden.

01:36And then if we're too slow or the concrete mixture is too soft or too runny essentially,

01:42then it's not going to be able to support the next layer when the printer comes around.

01:47When all goes well, the company says they can print the main structure of a house in about a week,

01:52compared to as long as six weeks using more traditional framing methods.

01:56If you say, hey, there's 20 steps to go from zero to building a home,

02:00which there's more or less depending on what you're looking at.

02:03If you can take a percentage point or half a percentage point out of every one of those steps,

02:07then ultimately you bring down the cost of home and ultimately you solve the housing crisis.

02:11And there's very much a crisis.

02:13UN statistics show that about 40% of the world's population will need access to adequate housing

02:19by 2030, or 96,000 adequate housing units every day.

02:24It says one in four people live in harmful conditions to health and safety.

02:29Harmful conditions like wildfires, as seen in Los Angeles earlier this year.

02:33But LA is hardly the only place in the country where wildfire damage is a risk.

02:39Here in the U.S., you know, we see signs of it increasing in its severity and intensity.

02:44So the U.S. Forest Service estimates that there are 70,000 communities and about 46 million homes

02:52in what we call the wildland-urban interface, which is an area where there's vegetation that meets housing

02:59and really sets up the conditions for wildfires to continue burning through our communities.

03:04Just for some context, that's about a third of our housing in the U.S. that is at risk to wildfires.

03:11And in this pocket of rural Colorado, that risk is here too.

03:15We have a mountain with plenty of combustible trees leading right down to this particular development.

03:20This is the highest fire risk development you can have.

03:24So we have to build with non-combustible materials in general based on code.

03:28But this already sets us up for that across all of our developments to be building with that level of material

03:34and provide a product that is quite a bit less combustible than what you would do with a wood-framed home.

03:39VeroTouch and a handful of other 3D printing firms are betting that time, labor and cost savings

03:45will eventually make durable homes cheaper to build.

03:48The 31 homes in this development are priced between $550,000 and $670,000, roughly the county's median.

03:57The technology works, but mass production that could ease the housing shortage is still a long way off,

04:02even as public interest grows.

04:05My partner and I have a business locally, and so affordable housing is super important to keep people being able to work with us.

04:13It's interesting. It's not necessarily cheap housing, but you do get masonry instead of stick, which is interesting.

04:20Would you buy a 3D printed house?

04:22Um, I can't say I wouldn't. I just don't know enough about them.

04:26Half an hour away, two finished and sold houses printed by the company stand ready to be rented,

04:32adding to the low hundreds estimate of existing 3D printed buildings in the world.

04:37It won't replace traditional construction anytime soon.

04:40But as housing needs grow and environmental factors become more extreme,

04:44technology is an inevitable part of how and what we build.

Category

Transcript

Be the first to comment

Recommended