One the one hand, we’re living at a time of ecological crisis when we need to be extracting all the value we can out of everything and reducing our energy footprint wherever we can.
And thus the news that a waste product could be repurposed to create high quality construction bricks out of a seemingly endless resource would appear to be welcome news indeed.
On the other, they’re made using poo and that’s a hard sell.
So… wait, is this research where that expression comes from?
Technically it’s the drained, treated and dried by product of sewerage, given the innocuous name of “biowaste”, but RMIT researchers have been trying out different mixes and hit upon an ideal recipe for high quality bricks.
The bricks are better insulators than usual clay bricks and take less energy to fire, while being as strong as conventional bricks.
They also could potentially use up the 30 per cent of our biowaste that doesn’t get used for things like fertiliser.
…and this guy.
The biowaste is only part of what goes into the bricks, by the way, so it’s not like the house will smell like you’re sealed in a poo-vault during a heatwave. We hope.
Now, this is just a pilot study and more research is necessary before poo-bricks become industry standard, but just imagine: a few times every day you could be a small but integral part of Australia’s construction boom!