Plastic homes for quick rebuilding after disaster

automotive industry — to attach the plastic structure to the concrete slab used as the foundation. The result is the structure “floats” atop the foundation in such a way it that can compensate for movements in the earth directly below, while the production process allows it to hold up against winds in excess of 240 kilometers per hour.

The tests that they use, they fire a two-by-four at 72 mph (115 km/h) at the wall out of a cannon,” Ball said. “Our wall sections can take multiple strikes, you can hit them numerous times without knocking them down.”

The product is impressive, although not incredibly unique. InnoVida Holdings LLC, a company based in Miami Beach, Florida that produces a composite building panel similar to those produced by ICI, also promotes its products as being hurricane and wind resistant while protecting against moisture, insects, rot, and mould. According to Craig Toll, InnoVida’s chief financial officer, such attributes are common to composite structures.

In an earthquake, there is a big stress and if your structure doesn’t have flexibility then the stress makes it crack -and that is what happens to concrete,” Toll said. “In our material … it sways instead of cracking and falling down.”

It would seem ICI’s attractiveness in Haiti goes beyond the technical specifications of the product. Brian Eames, manager of large export projects for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., notes the company’s final assembly procedure — whereby an ICI-produced home can be erected by four unskilled laborers in about two days — will prove important as ICI vies for a contract.

A lot of countries want to employ their populations in the [recovery] process,” he said. “So a company that comes in with a system using foreign workers may not do as well as something that engages the local population in putting together their own housing and taking ownership of it.”

Barely two years old, ICI has established a manufacturing base in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan., and is preparing to open another facility at a southern U.S. seaport, where it hopes it can soon start shipping the components for more than 5,000 homes to be assembled in Haiti. It is a process that would be facilitated by Barclays Gedi.

The Sun notes that all that research, design, and production is extremely expensive and the company, which began trading publicly last year, had to raise approximately $13.5 million through four financing rounds to make it happen. Raising that much money that quickly is never an easy feat and doing so during the worst economic downturn in a generation would seem nearly impossible.

Ilja Troitschanski, ICI’s chief financial officer, largely attributed his company’s odds beating fundraising success to the large enterprise credentials of its staff.

The reason we were able to do it is the strength of the team,” Troitschanski said. “People, especially in Canada, know how Magna promotes the entrepreneurial culture within the big company and I think that allowed us to actually raise the funds.”

[Although] the other side is definitely our technology, it is unique and it is [intellectual property]-protected and it has applications in large markets, so I think people saw that the company has potential, even in the tough times.”

Nobody believes in the potential of ICI more than its own staff. That is why, in addition to Haiti, the company is involved in the initial stages of low-cost housing projects in Iraq, Libya, Mexico, and Colombia.