This ain’t your mama’s prefab.

Mobile homes, step aside-shipping containers and other modern techniques and architectures are here.

This spring, Brio 54 introduces a new set of prefab residential prototypes. Brio54’s mission is to provide sustainable, affordable design while delivering high quality construction. Each Brio54 home comes complete with green features such as centralized efficient heating and cooling, moisture and ventilation control, dual flush toilets, energy star HVAC and appliances, passive solar energy design, all natural wood and stone flooring, and 3Form Ecoresin countertops.

They have some stiff competition. Since going into production earlier this year, Adam Kalkin has sold a dozen Quik Houses, each based on five shipping containers.

Cheap, strong and easily transportable by boat, truck or train, shipping containers have changed status from waste product to green construction material. The basic Quik House is a two-story, 2,000-square-foot home with three bedrooms, two baths, skylights, and enormous glass windows. The price ranges from $76,000 for the basic kit to $160,000. That`s less than $100 per square foot, including a stainless-steel kitchen and mahogany doors. His most recent design — the “Push Button House” — is a home built inside a shipping container with mechanized walls that open like a blossoming flower.

Architects Pieter Peelings and Silvia Mertens of Sculp(IT) live and work in this four story shipping container home. A spa is located on the roof. Hurricane proof, flood proof, and fire proof, these metal Lego blocks are tough enough to be stacked twelve high. Not only are they green, they fit neatly into odd spaces. Imagine slotting this home in between two skyscrapers!

What`s more, they`re movable. Travelodge recently constructed a “portable” hotel out of recycled shipping containers in London, in anticipation of the 2012 Olympics. Each room is a Travelpod. The containers fit together like a giant Lego set. They can be disassembled and easily reassembled at a different site, or used individually:

The hotel company plans to use Travelpods as an on-site camping alternative for events such as Burning Man. They will be transported from site to site to fit the need for temporary hotels.

Finally, shipping containers work as construction materials in all sorts of environments and difficult-to-reach spaces. These three pictures trace the construction of a home in the midst of a dense rainforest in Australia. This double container home is accessible only by a narrow, unpaved path. The PVC pillars keep the house dry, stable, and vermin-free without disturbing the complex root system underneath. The materials cost less than $16,000 and are both recycled (for the most part) and recyclable for the future.

We all have seen quirky one-off sculptures made from recycled materials but it is a decent bet that most designers don’t think about the possibilities of creating lines of recycled furniture. With so many materials going to waste in droves it seems a shame not to think big about how to give these a new life. While many of these are still mostly conceptual a lot of them have potential beyond being whimsical one-time creations.

Aluminum shavings sound like something that might be easy to recycle but they aren’t. In fact they are normally dumped into landfills though one designer has decided to turn them into quite classy-looking nicely-colored counter-tops. Now you could pay more for a granite counter-top or have something that both looks equally interesting/variegated and makes a great conversation piece.

Newspapers can be a very tricky thing to reuse without recycling but one student designer has figured out away to work around their weaknesses and play on their strengths. The strength and the natural ‘give’ of the newspapers provides a solid-but-soft underlying structure to this otherwise sturdy chair.

Whether these recycled spoon creations are tacky or clever is up to you to decide. They certainly are more variegated and playful than some of the other simpler designs shown here. Judging from her dress and decor however they are a perfect fit to the designer’s own style.

Old tires are probably some of the most prevalent not-easily-recyclables on the planet. The above solution is really quite simple and small-scale enough that not a lot of reworking of the tires is necessary to create these comfortable little chairs.

One has to wonder if these old whiskey barrel parts used to create various pieces of furniture have a lingering odor (pleasant or otherwise) from their days of aging alcoholic beverages. Regardless, though, they do have a rough-and-ready character from their slightly uneven shapes that gives a natural variety to the resulting designs that somehow makes them feel more comfortable, aged and homey.

It sure takes a lot of drinking straws to make a single piece of furniture but if the material is difficult to do anything else with then why not, really? It’s hard to imagine this wouldn’t crush under pressure but perhaps the sheer number is enough to make it stable while the void spaces make it comfortable.

In clockwise order shown above are various more great examples of recycled urban furniture: a light made from broken light tubes, a lamp made from an old iron, a chair from a shopping cart and a table from bent bike tires. If you have any additional ideas for ordinary trash you could turn into interesting recycled furniture you can add them in the comments below.

Who dreams up a car that runs on wood or coffee grounds or a way to turn road traffic into energy? Technology is always unpredictable and no one knows for sure what the future holds. Some of these ideas are brilliant and some are bizarre but at least these folks are thinking way outside of the box. The truck above, for example, runs on a strange combination of vegetable oil and ammonia.

Fueling your vehicle with coffee sounds like a strange alternative use for caffeine but it gets better: you don’t have to waste your favorite roast, you can simply use your remnant grounds. Through through process of gasification the reused grounds are carefully converted into a burnable fuel.

Using leftover alcoholic beverages as fuel is actually nothing new - they have been doing it with banned booze in some countries for years! All the same it is a ‘local’ way to take leftovers you aren’t using (like that bottle of vermouth you seem to never go through) and make something useful out of it.

Powering a car with wood may not be the most ecological power innovation in this list but it is at least an example of thinking of ways to run vehicles on anything but fossil fuels - a step in the right direction. All the same, emissions are of course still a major issue to be considered.

Using cars to create power is brilliant but also a bit puzzling: the process takes energy from one of the most wasteful energy consuming activities in the world and at least salvages a portion of that energy in a clean fashion. So far this is in prototype stages but in essence pressure is used by plates beneath roads to compress hydraulic fluid. The bigger the truck, the more power it uses but the more it generates as well! Best of all, you could turn around and funnel this energy into hybrid fueling stations - essentially getting a second round of energy out for the same vehicular use.

The original Spiral Island was the talk of the world: a man-made floating island constructed from 250,000 plastic bottles that could drift and relocate as needed until it was destroyed by disaster. Now the new Spiral Island is slated to open to the public within the next few months in Laguna Makax near Isla Mujeres. The new island has drawn in donations, volunteers and visitors from all parts of the world and walks of life - people inspired by what may be one of the most impressive do-it-yourself projects of modern times.

(Above: the old Spiral Island, Below: The new one under construction)

The infamous island has been at the center of controversies with each step forward as any endeavor this industrious and unusual is likely to be. Some claim it is a brilliant environmental design - using almost exclusively recycled materials in its construction. Others note that when the last island was destroyed it resulted in the littering of its materials and is in many ways the work of a single insane architectural genius. Still, were it not for that catastrophe those materials would still be providing a home for some and destination for others with a minimal use of non-recycled parts and clearly its creators never intended for it to be demolished in such a fashion.

There is a variety of media available to people who want to learn more about spiral island. The Spiral Islanders site has forums, a blog, photo collections and videos related to the construction and history of the island as well as the stories and experiences of those who have worked on it and the areas in which they have done so. It is easy to see how, as people learn more and more about the project, they become increasingly intrigued and many ultimately end up visiting and helping with the island itself. The Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not video below and photo collection are also a great place to get a feel for the island.

Find more photos like this on Richie Sowa’s Spiral Island

Let’s face it, trying to solve a big problem in one quick step rarely works out, particularly when the problem is global and touches on virtually all kinds of transporation. Too many alternative energy concept vehicles try too hard to rely on a single source of energy. Electric cars need frequent recharges and solar-powered vehicles of course need the sun. These three vehicles are a worthy stop-gap measure as the world slowly learns to rely less and less on conventional fuel sources and turns more and more to renewable energy.
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