You’ll Be in a World of Yurt

by Jim Washburn

Packing peanuts: I will not rest until the first five Google results for those little angel poops come up me. Toward that end, I would like to offer my first words of substance on the stuff, which come from my friend Vince Daukas: Packing peanuts equal affordable housing.

He informed me that the PBS program Design Squad recently awarded the $10,000 grand prize in their “Trash to Treasure” competition to a Natick, Massachusetts ninth-grader named Max Wallack for a “Home Dome” shelter he designed made of packing peanuts stuffed into plastic grocery bags.

The 12-year-old inventor said he was inspired to design the shelters after seeing homeless people on the streets during a trip to Chicago. His initial prototype, he said, was based on the yurt, a circular home native to Mongolia and Tuva. In truth, his prototype looks like it was based on a pile of fire-retarded marshmallows, but I figure cut the kid some slack since yurt is one of those terms like goulash or conceptual art that people routinely use to legitimize their mistakes. I’ve slept in an actual Grass Valley hippie yurt, and they are supposed to look like neat, circular, canvas constructs with peaked roofs, not like a fetal Michelin Man.

I gather what they do on Design Squad is hook their young inventors up with adult designers to refine their ideas. In this case, Wallack’s misshapen yurt was transformed into a geodesic dome. The panels had bent aluminum frames, over which two plastic sheets were heat-sealed, except for one side into which the peanuts were poured and then sealed. Joined with other panels, they formed a neat, sturdy Home Dome. There’s no need for a door, because the dome is light enough you just lift one end off the ground to get in or out. Wallack even came up with a portable bed made of packing peanuts, which attaches to the dome so your sleeping weight will keep the thing from blowing away in the wind.

It’s a cool idea in that it recycles stuff that would otherwise be landfill, and creates inexpensive, lightweight shelter at a time when people certainly need it. The Styrofoam provides a fair amount of insulation and it’s opaque enough to allow some privacy while letting daylight filter in. If you ever need some peanuts to ship something in, they’re just a knife flick away. And, since I’ve learned that some packing peanuts are made of natural cornstarch, you can have the empowering feeling that the Home Dome is a king-sized snack food bag and you’re the free prize inside.

On the downside, the dome shown on the show doesn’t look like it would disassemble easily, so the units may not lend themselves overmuch to the transient lifestyle. Maybe they could duct-tape two into a ball and roll it along with them. And while the domes could provide shelter in a semi-permanent tent city, it is not good homeless PR to have your already unpopular neighborhood take on the appearance of a human wasp nest.

The domes could have commercial uses, perhaps as kids’ play igloos, or real igloos as the polar regions continue to melt, or as pet houses. Or suppose your college frat buddy staggers in, announces “Man, I drank so much rum I feel like Captain Morgan peed up my ass!” then passes out: Just deposit him in an inverted dome and there’s little worry that he might soil your surroundings. More than they already are, I mean.

It’s always difficult to sell a sell new idea. Marketing it to the masses, overcoming institutional inertia, meeting the resistance from both the owners and unions vested in the old idea.

We all heard about alternative building materials when we were kids—gingerbread, shoes, towers—but no one said how hard it would be to implement them in real life. This would be a great time for me to tell you about my late, great friend John Crean and his attempt to build innovative housing tracts in California a few years back, but that’s a whole chapter or three in itself, so let’s save that for next time, shall we? I will tell you now that it is not a happy story, though it’s nowhere near as unhappy as the kind where a beloved family chimp tears your face off.

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