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Having a roof over our heads is a basic human need, but shouldn’t come at the expense of the environment, which houses the rest of the creatures on this planet. There are numerous housing designs that can be self-assembled from recycled materials (and be recycled themselves), are portable and small enough to be shipped with a low carbon footprint, and have lower energy requirements than the four-wall and slate-roof model we take for granted. The building materials are all around us; it’s up to us to put them together.

Yurt
A common type of flat-pack home is the yurt. It was developed and has been used for centuries by central-Asian nomads. Similar to a teepee, a yurt consists of a wooden, circular frame covered in felt or waterproof canvas that provides insulation in winter and can be rolled back in summer.

Instructions for building a yurt and a directory of companies selling ready-made models are good places to start. Eco-Yurts, for example, which range from $6-$10,000 depending on size, are made from local sustainable wood, finished with non-toxic, non-VOC, food-grade Tung oil.

Pallet House
Temporary houses built from discarded wooden shipping pallets fight deforestation by reusing wood instead of cutting down new trees. Worldwide wooden-pallet recycling exchange plans are available, as are various articles, blogs and online videos that describe how to make a pallet house. I-Beam Design’s Palette House is made from 80 pallets costing around $500.

Shellhouse
NYU grad student Carolina Pino has designed a collapsible version of the typical cardboard box used by the homeless. Her Shellhouse can be folded up like an accordion to be carried over the shoulder. And it has an embedded radio transmitter that can be picked up by cell phones and Google maps. This could prove useful for food deliveries or emergency services. Online instructions show how to build a Shellhouse out of discarded cardboard for only $35.

SHRIMP
Another concept, yet to be sold commercially, that uses discarded packaging is Vestal Design’s SHRIMP (Sustainable Housing for Refugees via Mass Production). Made from empty box-shaped shipping containers, these mobile houses would utilize the shipping containers that have piled up globally; it’s cheaper to build new containers than ship existing ones back to their source.

Space efficient, the SHRIMP folds into a quarter of the size of a shipping container, enabling a single shipload to provide housing for roughly 100,000 people, reducing the carbon footprint caused by shipping if transport is required. Designed for emergency situations, the SHRIMP can even float, as it is fixed to six pontoons, making it ideal for flooded areas or for loading the house off a ship that cannot find a place to dock. Each would cost up to $4,000.

WheelLY
The WheelLY prototype is a wheel from which two polyester resin tunnels fold out to form the shape of an 11-foot-long caterpillar. It looks like a child’s play tunnel, except that each end is closed and rests on the ground. Invented by Italian designers and architects ZO_loft, the WheelLY is easy to transport by folding each end into the central ring and pushing the ‘wheel’ along with the aluminum handle. A cloth bag inside the rolling frame can hold up to 250-pounds of objects. To reduce the selling price of this 100%-recyclable home, companies could pay to advertise on the wheel.

The trend in portable environmental housing is to use discarded materials for the frame, which can then be furnished with fabrics to suit the weather and ground conditions. As well as housing refugees from disaster zones, portable homes could shelter the global homeless, save space in crowded cities, and make ideal holiday homes while saving the environment—the ultimate home of all creatures on this planet, including mankind.

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