Urban growth: bio-bricks offer a whiff of the future

newscientist.com ^ | 18:00 25 July 2014 by , | Brendan Byrne

[ConservingFreedom]

I laid a bio-waste brick this morning ...

[ETL 2]

“bio-waste brick”

What do they scoop them out of the john?

[DManA]

I hadn’t hear there was a brick clay shortage.

[dsc]

This is what we have come to?

From building the Empire State Building to piling up wads of garbage.

[Gaffer]

Mine was more like an Obama.

[DManA]

agricultural waste

These are environmentalists? There is no such thing as agricultural waste. All vegetable matter can be composted and used to enrich the soil.

[Da Coyote]

“Mine was more like an Obama.”

Hence the new Oxford Dictionary term, “Taking a bodacious Obama.”

[Vigilanteman]

. . . bound with fungal fibre . . .

I have to ask just how good the fungal fibre is going to hold up after the first drenching rain. I'm guessing it is not going to smell so good either.

[chrisser]

Right now, Hy-Fi is an environmentally friendly chill-tent for urban partygoers.

I wonder if the author realizes that he's come up with a metaphor to describe the entire environmental movement - a chill-tent for urban partygoers.

[camle]

lots of hype, few specifics. my guess is that this wont’ work in the real world...just sayin’

[BenLurkin]

Excellent!

[Dr. Thorne]

How long before they discover that bio-bricks are toxic and cause cancer?

[Dallas59]

[Mike Darancette]

So, would a sh!^-brick house be more cost effective and environmentally friendly than adobe?

[Avid Coug]

His building looks like a big ginger root.

[Steven Scharf]

” Ecovative, the sustainable bio-materials firm partnering with The Living, can grow the bricks in approximately five days from agricultural by-products such as corn stalks held together with mycelium – the vegetative matter of mushrooms. “

These bricks are not made from waste products, but from stuff grown from agricultural by-products. The waste stream discussion is off base.

But the idea of creating bricks from garbage is not a new one. Back in the early 1970s there was a contestant on What’s My Line who had invented a brick product made from super compressing garbage into brick like blocks.

I have always taken my conservatism form the concept of conservation. As an early teenage, I was intrigued by ideas like this. I do not support government funding development of products like this, but I do encourage capitalist to work on these types of innovations.

I suspect they came across the toxicity issue with garbage very quickly.

[TangoLimaSierra]

[BTCM]

A favorite saying once was, “If the truth were known, we’d zit a brick”. Never thought they’d be used in construction, must be the Obama library.

[moovova]

“Honey, what’s that smell?”