We already have several reinventions of the brick which are stronger and more eco-friendly -- we call them concrete blocks.
I thought it was pretty silly to compare this product to bricks on it's cost/strength/waste. People aren't choosing brick for these factors anyway. People choose brick mainly for the aesthetic.
This article has inspired me to make a brick. The regular kind. I have tons of clay and a forge that can melt steel, honestly it just never occured to me so now I have to try!
This is in CNN Style for a reason. It's a neat research project, great for prestige projects like Hyde Park. It just cannot compete with clay from a cost perspective.
I've heard great things about CEB (compressed earth blocks).
Sounds like a more rigorously engineered form of the Compressed Earth Brick. https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/Compressed_Earth_Blo...
I think the killer invention would be to solidify C02 efficiently for building materials (much like trees do).
Tim Harford has an episode about why bricks have been so great for humanity for so long, and a bit on why they are so hard to improve on:
> To make it, construction and demolition waste including bricks, gravel, sand and plasterboard is crushed and mixed with water and a binder
I notice they don't mention what the binder is, and I see it labeled as a "secret binder" in another article.
As far as different mediums for building go, check out sirewall. Or insulated rammed earth wall. It is only 9 pct cement. And can make some pretty charming spaces.
What's the binder?
It would be interesting to see exactly how much CO2 was created in the process of creating a brick vs the amount of CO2 created during transportation. This tech seems like a good idea until you realize every brick is being produced in one spot in England... the real problem isn’t creating these bricks, it’s building out the infrastructure to supply a significant demand.
I work in the masonry trade, all of the materials we use are from brick yards and quarries that are local (~75-100mi radius) for the simple fact that transporting large numbers of pallets of brick over long distances is a logistical nightmare. Storing them can also prove to be a problem, so much so that we literally throw away thousands of bricks we have left over from jobs every year. It’s rare that two customers would use the same bricks and we end up keeping the extras until we know we’re not getting called back in to do additional work.
They’re right that reclaiming bricks as being labor intensive work. The real holy grail of this industry would be figuring out how to reclaim the trillions of bricks already in circulation without needing human intervention. There is often huge demand for antique bricks because a lot of the unique clay deposits used to create the bricks end up being totally depleted. Milwaukee, WI is famous for their Cream City bricks that were produced in the mid and late 19th century but once the unique clay beds used to create these bricks were gone, so were new Cream Cities. You can see these in just about every city’s downtown in Wisconsin. I’ve spent many hours reclaiming these bricks from old houses and factories because for one, they look incredible, and two, they’re worth about a dollar a piece once they’re ready to be laid again (Pretty good money if you’re good with a brick hammer). If there was a way you could dump a house worth of old bricks into one end of a black box and spit out reusable brick from the other end, you’d basically be printing money. Mortar is not easily removed from brick without damaging the brick. That’s kind of the whole point of the mortar being used as a binder in the first place.