brickO’live

S. Ayça Metin, Berkay Öztürk, Merve Taşdelen

Northern Portugal is known for its food quality. The region produces its own high-quality table olive and olive oil. However, researchers point out that the food sector is the biggest contributor to Portugal’s ecological footprint. It means that if all people in the world consumed like the Portuguese, we would need 2.3 planets Earth. Food weighs 30% of the Portuguese’s ecological footprint, transportation 20%, and housing weighs 10%. The connection between the expected growth in olive production and the footprint issue made us question how we can sustainably approach olive production. With that in mind, we have analyzed the dominant olive and olive oil production locations, museums with olive culture content, and organizations that support bio-based activities. We are proposing our site to be related to these 3 main topics; innovation research, production, and culture. Increasing olive oil production will result in a huge amount of waste. We are proposing to use olive waste as a building material. It is also possible to produce biofuel from waste. Thus, to develop the material strength and investment we are proposing being in collaboration with the green organizations. So that the Spirala can be a model for sustainable architecture and circularity.