Alex Eaves, a Northeastern graduate, practices the environmental art of reusing products. His beautifully repurposed home shows the way.
Alex Eaves lives in the back of a converted U-Haul truck. It’s much nicer than you might think.
“Want to see it?” he asks a visitor on a recent Tuesday, not long after Eaves had parked his highly practical home on Centennial Commons and popped open the back door for any and all passersby to climb up for a mini-tour.
Eaves, a 1999 Northeastern University graduate, has been preaching reuse solutions for more than two decades. His devotion to combating worldwide waste defines his lifestyle. His home, a 2006 Ford with 160,000 miles, is an embodiment of his beliefs.
Reusing products is far more constructive than recycling them, Eaves insists.
“It is the easiest, biggest impact we can make on the planet,” says Eaves, who hasn’t used a disposable coffee cup since 2007. “People have for years been talking about recycling, but as we all are pretty much well aware, recycling is not working.
“Why would I take this glass bottle that’s perfectly good, smash it and have a truck carry it away to make another one?” he asks. “Why wouldn’t I just use it, rinse it out and use it again?
“It’s what our parents and our grandparents did for generations and generations. Why, all of a sudden, did we screw it up? I think we all know why: It’s because the more stuff people make, the more money they make.”
His life changed upon learning two decades ago that boxes of T-shirts were doomed to be shredded because of a simple misprint; he saved those shirts and repurposed them. In 2008, he transformed his skateboard brand, STAY VOCAL, into a reuse clothing brand that is now green-certified.
Eaves is also founder and director of Escape the Waste, an edutainment company that addresses global waste issues by focusing on reuse solutions.
Over the past decade Eaves has been certified as a master reuser by the Reuse Institute while directing a pair of award-winning documentaries, including “The Box Truck Film: Building A Reuseful Home.”
The subject of that 2022 film has been Eaves’ residence for several years. It is cozy (and surprisingly roomy) with a predominant color theme of bright teal.
The short step up into Chez Eaves reveals a small desk immediately to the left manned by a plastic orange (and long ago discarded) school chair. One of the desk’s legs is a sturdy tree branch salvaged from a storm by his friend and co-builder, Derek “Deek” Diedricksen, a fellow Northeastern graduate.
The truck cost $7,900 plus a thrifty $792 for the mostly repurposed materials that turned it into his 98-square-foot home.“His needs are minimal,” says Diedricksen, who has hosted a year-long HGTV series on tiny homes and maintains a blog, Relaxshacks, on the subject. “He’s like, ‘I want to be able to charge a phone and run my laptop, a couple lights and a little electric range. It’s pretty sparse.”
Joining in on the Northeastern reunion is a third Husky graduate, Amy Henion, who often helps showcase the home and thereby spreads the word.
The former U-Haul features everything you’d find in a normal home, only less so. The closet shelves are packed efficiently with folded clothes. Sharing a wall with the driver’s compartment are two narrow beds, each 7 feet long.
In the morning Eaves swings his legs out from the uppermost bed and, pivoting right, is facing his kitchen — small shelves of bulk foods above a sink and a two-burner hot plate. (Eaves dines out often, notes Diedricksen.)
The unique decor includes an overhead light fashioned from two old license plates bent to form a square lampshade. To maximize living space, storage units tend to be vertical — such as a slim, green-metal military helicopter box (passed down from his father) containing maps of reuse items in the truck that Eaves hands out at public events.
Situated between the desk and the bedroom/kitchen is a tall narrow bathroom, similar to what you might find in a boat, with a boxy sawdust-compost toilet that Eaves temporarily removes when he wants to use his solar bag shower via a handheld nozzle.
All it requires is a water hook-up, similar to an RV setup. A simple 110-volt extension cord provides the home with electricity.
Eaves credits his father, a former auto mechanic who taught him to creatively find new uses for broken or otherwise discarded materials.
By American standards of convenience it cannot be an easy way to live. But Eaves is passionate about his home and what it stands for.
“I love a lot of it,” he says of his lifestyle.
Turning to face the campus of his alma mater — home to the curious students who have been stopping by to hear and see his story — he adds: “I am loving today.”