Armed with little more than a glue gun, a mallet and a color-coded instruction pamphlet, a team of unskilled laborers constructed a Florida apartment complex in under two months.
Their secret was none other than Renco, a fully recyclable construction material with interlocking blocks that pop together like Legos.
Color-coded instructions show builders where to place blocks, which are easily attached using a spray of industrial adhesive and a few whacks by a mallet.
According to the website, the blocks can currently accommodate up to five stories, but approval to build up to eight stories is anticipated by the end of the year.
‘As 95% of all Americans live in eight stories or less, we believe this next level of approval will open an incredible amount of opportunity for use of this revolutionary product,’ the website reads.
Coastal Construction recently completed a production facility for producing Renco blocks, with the capacity to produce enough of the material to build 5,000 apartment units a year.
‘I’m not saying we can build everything in the world but we haven’t been stumped yet,’ Murphy said.
The name is a portmanteau of ‘renewable’ and ‘composite’ and the bricks are a mix of repurposed glass, plastic, calcite dust and resin.
Renco has now been used to build a 96-unit apartment building in Palm Springs – the first of its kind.
‘You can put any façade on top of it,’ explained Patrick Murphy, executive vice president of Coastal Construction, the developer behind the project.
‘It can look, at the end of the day, like a five-star hotel, or it can be workforce housing, or anything in the middle.’
The Lakewood Apartments complex, four three-story buildings with 48 two-bedroom and 48 three-bedroom apartments, used just 22 block shapes.
The material can resist Category 5 gales – like fiberglass, the blocks have high strength and stability.
Along with his father, Coastal Construction founder Tom Murphy Jr., Murphy flew to Turkey to see the material in person.
The material was developed there and has been used in more than 100 projects since 2012. It has now been licensed and approved for construction in the United States.
But Murphy recognized the scope of their project dwarfed much of Renco’s previous usage.
‘It’s one thing to build a house or a little storage facility,’ Murphy told Fast Company. ‘It’s another to build a multi-story apartment building with people living in it.’
The father-son duo brought the material home with the intention of constructing a facility to assemble the blocks before using them in stormproof housing.
To his surprise, the approval process lasted a decade.
Murphy, himself a two-term Congressman, attributed the delay to ‘the bureaucracy of the system itself,’ rather than the any issues with the material.
The company performed hundreds of tests against termites and other pests, mold, earthquakes, and, of course, hurricanes.
In addition to its strength and stability, the Renco website touts other benefits including zero waste; light weight (the heaviest blocks weigh 80 pounds, but most can be lifted by one person); and, most impressively, no need for maintenance.
The manufacturers drew this conclusion over eight years of testing in the United States, noting that ‘there is no apparent demise of the product.’
The material was also designed to be easily stacked and hammered into place by people not trained in construction, as the industry faces an extreme labor shortage.
According to a 2023 report from Associated Builders and Contractors, the industry needed to attract nearly 600,000 workers last year on top of the normal pace of hiring to meet demands.
It took only eleven unskilled laborers to complete the Lakewood Apartments project.
Color-coded instructions show builders where to place blocks, which are easily attached using a spray of industrial adhesive and a few whacks by a mallet.
According to the website, the blocks can currently accommodate up to five stories, but approval to build up to eight stories is anticipated by the end of the year.
‘As 95% of all Americans live in eight stories or less, we believe this next level of approval will open an incredible amount of opportunity for use of this revolutionary product,’ the website reads.
Coastal Construction recently completed a production facility for producing Renco blocks, with the capacity to produce enough of the material to build 5,000 apartment units a year.
‘I’m not saying we can build everything in the world but we haven’t been stumped yet,’ Murphy said.
