Eco-friendly, coir wood houses soon in Pollachi

KSR Coirs — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 15:58:08 +0000

Pollachi, known as the coconut capital of the state, will soon get a model house built entirely of coir wood. The Coir Board, which is setting up the house, aims to make use of coir wood more popular among the construction industry in the area.

Coir wood, besides being an eco-friendly product because it does not involve felling of trees, is also an affordable alternative to plywood.

The Coir Board which inaugurated the first model coir house in Alappuzha on Saturday, said they planned to set up similar such homes in Pollachi and Kanyakumari next. “These homes would be much cheaper than a brick and mortar house or even a plywood house, because it costs only around 90 a sq ft,” said a Coir Board official.

“With eco-friendly being the new trend, this house will be 100% environment friendly because it is built out only a by-product of coconut and does not involve felling or exploitation of coconut trees at all,” said the chairman of the Coir Board, C P Radhakrishnan.

Coir is a by-product is extracted from the coconut husk, also called the mesocarp tissue of the fruit. The fibre, after cleaning and removing the husk, is golden colour. Coir is a popular material to make mats, mattresses, baskets and even as a replacement for soil for terrace gardening. However, use of it to construct something as large as a house is a first for the country.

Right from the walls and doors of the house to the windows, flooring, floor carpets, pillars and even light-fittings, the model house is entirely built out of coir wood, said officials. “We have used Coir wood sheets for the walls and coir granules for the interiors,” said the official.

“With Pollachi having vast acreage with coconut cultivation and it being the single largest producer of coir fibre, we think it will be an ideal place to set up the house,” he said. “With many eco-friendly and natural resorts coming up in the area, we hope that the house that will come up in three months will give them ideas,” said the chairman. “We also want it to encourage entrepreneurs to get into coir wood production,” he added.

The house has been designed by Bengaluru-based coir research center, which already has set up a house in their campus outdoors almost three years back. “Their house has already shown that coir wood can withstand nature’s heat, rain and the cold,” said the official. “We also have five different types of coir boards for different conditions, we are also conditioning them in a way that they don’t catch fire easily, stand strong, don’t start seeing leakages or break down,” said Radhakrishnan.