Nikki Larson and six of her Western Washington University students are working on an unusual recycling project they hope will result in helping Haiti residents get new homes while cleaning up their country.

Larson, an associate professor of engineering technology, and her students are working on the best ways to create small homes made from plastic waste that litters earthquake-shattered Haiti. If the logistics of a trip can be worked out, she said several of them hope to visit Haiti this summer.

She talked about the project along with senior Andrew Buriak, 23, who is majoring in plastics engineering technology and vehicle engineering technology, and envisions a career in aerospace. The other students are Paul Yaeger, Nate Rohner, Nick McGuire, John Ok and Frances Scharnhorst.

Question: How did this all come about?

Larson: Pastor Eddy Fowler-Lindner has a Lutheran ministry in Kent and came to Western in fall 2010 because he knew we have a plastics program. He is dedicated to doing relief housing in Haiti and thought we might be able to help. The country has over half a million people still left homeless by the earthquake when their tin homes collapsed. I felt there had to be something we could do to help. The main challenge is not to import anything into Haiti.

Q: Why create homes with plastics?

Larson: There are millions of plastic objects littering every shore, every waterway, every street -packaging, bottles, laundry containers and other items made of plastics brought in by the many thousands of relief workers. Haiti doesn’t have the garbage service, doesn’t have a way of disposing of all this plastic. They also burn plastic waste in ways we culturally do not. It creates very dark, sooty smoke.

Q: How do your students figure in this?

Larson: We want research and development by our students to lead to recycling plastic waste to use in home construction without importing anything into Haiti. This way, we also put people in Haiti to work.

Q: How would the plastic be gathered?

Larson: There is very high unemployment in Haiti and people live on about $3 a day. Unemployed people would be hired to gather the plastic. Other people would be hired to manufacture the plastic pieces to make walls, roofs and beams, and to build the homes. Then homes would be sold to people who need them. It’s kind of like teaching people to fish instead of giving them fish.

Q: Andrew, how did you get involved?

Buriak: I needed some credits for technical electives. Nikki is my advisor, and I asked her what I could do. She talked with me about this project. I thought it was an exciting idea – the challenge of designing a process and a mold that would work in such a situation. It’s just so different from what we’ve learned in classes. We’re using a fairly forgiving material with a wide range of temperature at which it melts.

Larson: This waste plastic creates very tough materials. Hundreds of recycled objects would be used in the building of each home.

Q: Do you work as a team?

Buriak: We definitely treat it like a student teach, though we each have our own specialty. A lot of our projects overlap. For example, I’m involved in the process of creating the most efficient process of melting the plastic to create the panels – the largest piece would be 4 by 8 if we can do that. Another student is working on efficient ways to connect the panels for the walls and another is working on creating the beams.

Q: Are waste plastics used like this anywhere else in the world?

Larson: Probably not in this way, though in Guatemala, recycled plastic bottles are used between walls as insulation.

Buriak: Some other groups have tried to use plastics as building blocks, but in much different ways than we’re working on. It’s exciting to think of helping people in Haiti in a way that hasn’t been done before. No other place has these needs in the way they’re lined up in Haiti. An engineer in Haiti doesn’t have access to the tools we have. We have everything we need for research and development at Western. I hope to go Haiti. It would be exciting to teach people how to build their own houses.