My urbanite runneth over

Urbanite, for the uninitiated, is the recycling and reuse culture’s word for broken concrete. As a building stone it is remarkable in that it “naturally” occurs in slabs of even thickness making it very stackable. When stacked with reasonable care you can build structures that look a lot like unmortared cobblestone.

 The only real problem with urbanite walls is that you need chunks of roughly even size to make a decent wall. That means that if you let a construction company dump urbanite in your yard you will end up with both small rubble you can’t use and a lot of huge immovable boulders that you either have to break up pay someone to haul away. Alternately you can patrol construction sites and grab pieces of the size you need. That can be a tedious process.

When a crew repairing sewer lines in the area asked if they could use the dead-end street out my back gate to dump urbanite I quickly agreed. I can grab whatever chunks I need as I need them and they haul away the rest. It looks like they are going to be working in the area for several months so for now I have a never ending supply of urbanite. I’ve built an herb spiral, two raised bed planters and I’m starting to terrace the hillside in my backyard with urbanite retaining walls.