There's a lot you can do with a 3-D printer. Now add "building a house in a day" to the list.

Make that 10 houses.

The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. (link in Chinese) has printed 10 homes in 24 hours out of recycled materials.

This isn't the first attempt at 3-D printing large structures in a short amount of time. Researchers in California are making a printer that can build a house in 24 hours.

In Amsterdam earlier this month, construction of a 3D-printed house began. The house is made out of plastic bricks that fit together like Lego. It's also being printed onsite.

The Chinese houses, on the other hand, weren't built onsite. They were printed in pieces and then put together in Shanghai's Qingpu district.

The pieces are made using recycled construction materials and industrial waste to form a concrete aggregate, Gizmodo reports. The 3-D printer used to build the houses is 500 feet long, 33 feet wide and 20 feet high. Each home costs around $4,800 to build.

"We purchased parts for the printer overseas, and assembled the machine in a factory in Suzhou," the company's CEO, Ma Yihe, told 3ders. "Such a new type of 3D-printed structure is environment-friendly and cost-effective."



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