Bio-Manufactured Bricks Are Made at Room Temperature, From Bacteria, Sand and Urine

An American computer architecture professor in Abu Dhabi has come up up with a new generation of sustainable brick — grown by bacterium using sand , Ca chloride , and pee .

Rather than being fired in a kiln , the brick are formed at way temperature , according toMetropolis Magazine , which honored the invention with a Next Generation Design award .

There ’s still some oeuvre to be done , because the bricks can be poisonous to groundwater . But the concept is round-eyed enough .

Polaroid Flip 09

The bricks are made in a process called microbial - induced calcite hastiness , or MICP . In a chain of chemical reaction , the bug on George Sand are joined together like glue . The leave brick looks like sandstone , but is as potent as clay - fired brick or even marble , Metropolis Mag pronounce . The factor include common bacterium and urea , a principal ingredient of human urine .

Ginger Krieg Dosier , an assistant architecture professor at the American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates , came up with the recipe . After several periods of tribulation and erroneous belief , she regain a convention that forgather into a “ baby brick . ” The key was letting the bacteria sit down for a long enough time period .

For now , the bricks are tiny — about Lego - sized — but the concept could interpret to a large plate . They take about a calendar week to grow , Metropolis Mag says .

Family Residence Damage Tornado Stlois

The downside is that microbial - induce calcite downfall produces vast amounts of ammonia . Microbes exchange the ammonium hydroxide to nitrates , which poisons groundwater . To puzzle out that problem , Dosier plans to design a system that would capture discharge and reuse them back into the brick - production cps .

Despite the challenge , the bacterium - bricks are a promising solution to a lasting architectural trouble , Metropolis Mag read . More than 1.3 trillion bricks are manufactured worldwide every year , and many are hand - made in ember - fired ovens . Brick - baking is a major source of carbon dioxide discharge .

But they ’re sturdy and tacky , meaning environmentally sustainable ace are hard to total by .

Last Of Us 7 Ellie Crash

One of the first “ dark-green ” bricks , honored with aPopSci Invention Award , is made from fly ash , the byproducts of coal - fired power plants .

Others include bricks made out ofrecycled credit card bottlesand one-time tyre , but they ’re being used for thing like fences and skylights , not building foundations .

The traditional brick manufacture is catching on , highlight its own green practices in an diligence web log . Last yr , the Brick Industry Association used monetary resource from the Environmental Protection Agency to evaluate the possibility of using methane from landfill in brick production .

Mission Impossible 8 Underwater