Toronto Star

Thousands of extra phone books are recycled every year, but some architecture students at a Halifax university had a better idea: they used more than 7,000 of them to build a house. "Every year, the phone companies print way more phone books than ever get picked up," said Richard Kroeker, the Dalhousie University architecture professor heading the project, as he examined the work-in-progress. "They get recycled, but it's quite a bit of energy that goes into turning them into egg cartons and so on. We're just experimenting to see whether you couldn't just immediately use them as a kind of building unit."