April 8, 2016 • 44 mins
What will the buildings of the future be made out of? Could you end up living in a house of blood? We explore the potential of biomaterials.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says we don't
need no education. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm
(00:23):
Joe McCormick. It took me a minute to get that one. Well,
it's because of the double negative that always trips me up. Yeah. Hi,
We're gonna talk today about something that's that's related to
topics we've addressed in the past. Right, We've talked about
innovations in architecture and previous episodes of Forward Thinking. Today
we're going to kind of get a little more granular.
(00:43):
We're actually looking at the future of the materials we
use to build stuff, mostly annular like building. Was that
an aggregate pun? It could be, It wasn't intended to be.
But really, once you make a pun, either you intended
it or not, it's kind of the world. You've unleashed
it upon the world, the world to do with what
(01:06):
they will. Yeah, but we really have. We've talked about
lots of futuristic methods of putting together buildings. We've talked
about architecture, we've talked about three D printing of whole houses.
What else I mean, yes, the modular stuff that people
are exploring, you know, that the high quality, low environmental
impact pre fabrication that people are doing. Uh. And of course,
of course those techniques are going to help shape what
(01:28):
materials are used in the future. But let us talk
today about specifically those materials because material science is so
much fun. Let's get it down to a weird particulate level.
It's it's it's important too. When you think about it,
it's almost like everything is made out of materials. It's
almost like the universe is largely material in nature. Well,
(01:52):
just where you're living in a material world and you
are a material girl, you know, and you've got to
live in a material house. So thinking about materials is
very important when it comes to how we build our cities,
from the individual home to the skyscraper, especially to other
planet habitats. Oh sure, sure, but it's especially important to
(02:13):
think about all of that kind of stuff because the
things that we have been classically using throughout history to
construct our stuff is not sustainable, and it's especially going
to be less and less sustainable as the population and
especially the urban population grows. Yeah, so let's think about
some of the materials that we use most often to
build our building. So there's there's straw, there's sticks, right,
(02:38):
and there's bricks that keeps the wolves held at least
one of them. But no, no, no, no, no, let's
think like that. We got wood, you got steel, you've
got concrete. Those are big glass, brick and mortar. These
are these are the old stand bys, the hits. Sure, yeah,
not everyone lives in the yard, right, But there are
(02:58):
ways that we could think of too not only improve
our methods of using these these greatest hits of the
building materials catalog, but also to branch out into totally
different areas of coming up with hard, sturdy stuff to
make the walls around us out of. But before we
do that, I think we should look at what the
motivation for this discussion would be. I mean, you might
(03:19):
be thinking, well, I don't know what the heck is
wrong with concrete. We already make stuff out of concrete.
That seems fine. Why don't we just cover the whole
world in concrete? Yeah, why don't we make boats out
of concrete? Okay? Well, that one I think we can
we can more easily dismiss. But why don't we make
computers out of concrete? I'm just saying, you know, let's
let's talk about the problems the challenges we face relying
(03:44):
on a substance like concrete. Now, Now, first of all,
we have to admit concrete was an amazing technological achievement. Right.
Without concrete, the world would not be the way it is. Sure,
and uh so, concrete is made by binding together aggregate
material with water and cement. It's pretty straightforward. And aggregate
material could literally be anything from crushed shells to small
(04:07):
rocks to say, gravel, sandy, whatever. And while so, the
real technology we're talking about here is cement, the idea
of cement, And and what you say is correct. Cement
is an amazing technology that has made much of human
civilization possible. But it does have its problems. Uh For
one thing, it is incredibly energy intensive to produce. According
(04:30):
to the US Energy Information Administration, as of July, the
cement industry was the single most energy hungry of all
manufacturing industries in the United States. Yeah, and and that
that energy that it's using is not really green energy particularly, No,
it tends to rely heavily on coal and on petroleum
(04:52):
coke and coke that's not the soft drink, not the
stuff that is a refreshing way to taste the feeling
it is. However, the real thing it sort of is, Yeah,
it's a high carbon, low hydrogen petroleum residue. It's not
especially refreshing. The way you make coke typically is that
you put essentially put coal in an oven and you
(05:12):
heat coal up to a very high temperature and you
end up with this almost kind of it looks very
spongy and porous substance that is coke. So it's really
ah another stage of coal. It is a fossil fuel,
which means it has all the trappings of other fossil fuels,
(05:33):
including the fact that when you use it in combustion
or you use it in in in any kind of
firing capacity, you're releasing carbon. Right, And we'll talk about
that in just a minute. But back to the energy
consumption in According to that same e I A report,
the cement industry alone accounted for one quarter of one
percent of all US energy consumption. So you might be
(05:55):
thinking one quarter one Yeah, that doesn't sound like all
that much really, but you would be wrong. This is
just one single industry against the background of all transportation, heating, grid, energy, cars, everything,
And when you think about it in that in those terms,
that's huge. That's enormous, UH. And it represents, in the
(06:16):
words of that e i A report quote, a share
of national energy used roughly ten times its share of
the nation's gross output of goods and services on average,
other energy intensive industry's share of energy uses roughly twice
their share of gross output. So that that's comparing its
role in the economy to how much energy it consumes.
(06:37):
So it's real inefficient. Yeah, you might say that. So
So in other words, the value we get from the
production is uh does not necessarily justify the energy cost
of producing it uh compared to other types of products. Right, Well,
I mean you might say it justifies it. In the
cement is just ubiquitous around the world. It's one of
(06:59):
the most to use products out there. In the e
i A also predicted that increasing energy use from the
cement industry is going to continue into the future. It's
a growing trend. Yeah, I mean, as urbanization happens, as
we have talked about a lot, people like building urban
environments out of cement because it's dirty, and it's great. Yeah,
So why does cement use so much energy energy to produce?
(07:21):
What are what are they doing? Are they like do
they have to detonate a volcano every time? They every time?
It's like alternate Thursdays. Yeah, it's only for fun. Well
what is the process? So, so let's I'll get into
a little more detail with cement. So the most common
type of cement around the world is called Portland's cement.
So it enjoys coffee, beards and flannel. Why does it
(07:45):
require so much energy? Well, it's a chemical combination of
stuff like calcium silicon. Your just killing me with those
two thousand nine jokes. Look, I'm a product of my time,
and that's you know, the dead jokes are gonna be
related back by. But yes, it's it's a chemical combination
of stuff like calcium, silicon, aluminum, iron, and some other stuff.
(08:09):
Raw materials that are used to make cement include limestone, shells,
chalk and shale clay, slate, slag which is essentially runoff
from other manufacturing processes, uh, silica, sand, and iron ore.
So you take all these different ingredients, uh, and you
need to put them into a a furnace or a
(08:31):
kiln and subject them to incredibly high temperatures. Uh. The
people usually refer to this as like a heating and
firing process, and not just for a few minutes, So
it's for a very long sustained period, and it often
requires multiple heating and firing uh sessions. So it's not
like you put the stuff in, you turn the temperature
(08:52):
up to you know, a thousand degrees, and you walk
off in twenty minutes later, Hey you got some ent.
That's not the way it works now. So because you
have to heat the stuff up to such a high temperature,
that's where a lot of this energy consumption is coming from.
That you have to get the temperature up to a
certain level and sustain it for a good long while.
What's the point of heating it to such a high temperature?
(09:13):
What does it do? It turns this this collection of materials. Uh.
And again it's not like cement is going to contain
all of the things I listed, but it's going to
contain a collection of those things. It's gonna heat all
of that up and and it's going to end up
creating a substance that's sort of rock like. And this
is in fact cement but in order to make it usable,
(09:35):
you have to grind that stuff down into powder. So
that requires more energy obviously to convert the rock into
the powder version. That's what you end up mixing with
the aggregate and water. Uh and uh. It becomes the
binding agents. So that's dry cement. If you were to
mix water with that, you would get wet cement. And
um uh. That is part of why it requires so
(09:57):
much energy. There's another component of energy. It isn't addressed
by this process, but it is in fact a very
important thing that we have to keep in mind and
something that that Joe you wrote about in the video
episode we did on this subject. That's the fact that
not only do you have to put in a lot
of energy to produce cement, but then you have to
use even more energy to get it to where it
needs to go. Right, So you're actually spending even more
(10:21):
energy to transport this finished product because you just made
powdered rocks. Those aren't light, right, I mean, I mean
even I mean it's lighter than than than wet rock.
By the by the subtraction of the they should shift
the cement wet. Well, it's my idea on top of
the fact that it's heavy cement trucks. I mean they
(10:41):
do that sometimes on top of the and you've got
to pour that cement out by a certain amount of
time or else it becomes dry in one of the
cement trucks, and that's a mess. But there's a MythBusters
episode blow up. Yeah, it was pretty impressive. But I
was gonna I was gonna add that not only is
it heavy, but your average construction project needs a crap
(11:02):
ton of the stuff. Right, So it is a non
trivial issue that not only does it take a lot
of energy to create this stuff, it takes a lot
of energy to get it to where it needs to be. Well,
let let's let us emphasize how non trivial this is.
So we mentioned earlier that there are carbon emissions. Exactly
how much do we know? Well, according to a group
of studies that was conducted through Columbia University CIRCA. Collectively,
(11:27):
this group of studies was called State of the Planet.
If you want to look it up, it's pretty fascinating. Um,
the cement industry is responsible for five per cent of
global carbon dioxide emissions. On one industry responsible for five Yeah,
and part of that part of the reason there is
that we are using so much cement. I mean, okay,
look like we've we said that. We said this like
(11:48):
kind of in passing, but to give to give you
a number. According to a report from two thousand nine
from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, concrete is
the second most consumed TiAl in the world every year,
after only water, and by consumed, I don't mean that
we're all rock biters. I just mean that that we're
making a lot of it and we're putting a lot
(12:09):
of it. Tease. Well, this rock biter would like to
issue a little defense because I don't think that our
purpose today is to say, hey, we need to stop
using cement to make concrete to make our buildings. That
that's not exactly the point. But I would say that
if we can replace some portion of our share of
traditional cement and concrete with better, more sustainable materials that
(12:33):
create structures that are just too safe and get the
job done, that would be a very good thing. This
this fell core agrees with you. Rock biter isn't just
a fun insult. It's it's it's a reference to story alright,
So never ending story references aside and trust me, we
could do an entire podcast of them. What is the
(12:54):
future of never ending story references? Apparently it will go
on forever based upon the title. Uh so at any rate, Well,
let's let's talk about some ways to make concrete more sustainable,
or to make concrete last even longer, so it helps
justify the process of making it in the first place. Right,
(13:16):
So if we can either make better concrete where it
requires less energy to create, or we make concrete that
lasts longer, so therefore the investment we make is quote
unquote worth it. Uh that's the first step. So let
me talk about a few of those. So one thing
we can look at is are there ways to make
concrete itself better, right as opposed to going to a
(13:38):
complete alternative. Are there things that we can do that
either make concrete last longer so therefore the energy investment
that we make at the beginning pays off over a
longer amount of time, or that we can decrease the
the ecological impact of creating the concrete in the first place.
So we started looking into some of this stuff. One
(13:58):
of the thing we wanted to talk about was the
ability to make stronger types of concrete so this idea
that it could last a longer time, we could hold
a greater load. I read a lot of very cynical
UH forum posts from people who work in the concrete
business and talked about different alternatives to your standard approach
to a concrete mix for stuff like roads or sidewalks,
(14:21):
And it almost always came into like a thing where
we said we would recommend using this particular type of
mixture because it would last a longer amount of time,
and the response we would get back is, but we
need to have a job in ten years, so we
want to make sure we have to replace this. Yeah.
I don't know how serious they were being, but there
(14:41):
was that. I was seeing it pop up in multiple
forums as I was looking into this. By the way,
people who work with concrete they are a very funny
group that has an incredibly dry sense of humor. Anyway,
concrete tends to be very very resistant to compression. Like
it's good at standing up to compression, but not so
(15:02):
much with ten stile strength. In other words, when you're
pulling along UH concrete, it tends to tear apart unless
you mix it with something else. So one way to
make stronger concrete is to increase the amount of cement
you add. But we just talked about how cement is
an energy intensive material. Right to to create cement, but
if you if you want to make stronger concrete, you
(15:24):
could add more cement to your cement to aggregate ratio.
For example, some people might say, instead of making that
a four bag mix, make it a five bag mix.
In other words, adding an extra bag of cement for
the same volume of some of concrete. So adding more
cement is not necessarily the best choice, but you can
do other things, like you can create mixtures in the
(15:47):
concrete that increase its strength. For example, carbon fibers. We've
talked about these. They're very lightweight, they have incredible strength.
They specifically will add ten stile strength to UH to
a material UH. If you do at with concrete, you
get what is called fibra rated concrete. It's a weird
word because it's not really a word, but that's what
(16:07):
they call it in the bizes And I guess. So
they also have polymer concrete, so they're adding polymers. Those
are those long chain molecules. We've talked about, plastic being
the famous polymer um and they'll use polymers to either
offset or even completely replaced cement as the binding agent.
So you could have a concrete where polymers are the binder,
(16:29):
not cement, and that is potentially better, But again it
depends on how you're producing the polymers. If it's all
petroleum based, you're really just again shifting some stuff over.
It may not be a net gain. Part of the
issue here is that if you can't make it an
an affordable alternative to the pre existing approach of concrete,
(16:52):
then from a financial standpoint, it's very hard to justify. Right.
If you're a company and you're looking to make a
profit out of building a project for a customer, then
one of the ways you can maximize your profits is
minimizing your costs. And while it might make more environmental
sense to go with a different material, it might make
(17:12):
less financial sense. And money makes the world go round.
Not to get totally cynical, but and of course there
are some some design firms out there who say, uh, look,
we build that into our price. You're gonna be paying
a higher price, but you're also going to know that
you're you're building isn't going to have the same environmental
impact as the one across the street. And for some
(17:33):
people that's true, yes, and it might last longer. It's
a great point. So let's talk about greener concrete. Now.
One thing you need to know is if you do
a Google search for green concrete, one of the things
that pops up is the fact that green concrete doesn't
necessarily mean eco friendly concrete because the American Concrete Institute
uses the term green concrete to mean concrete that is
(17:56):
hardened or there's the set but not yet hardened. Essentially,
it's like it's like when you're saying someone is green,
you know, being meaning that they haven't become a seasoned
veteran or whatever in this yeah, exactly exactly, so not
fully ripe. That doesn't mean that there aren't folks trying
to make a more eco friendly concrete. There are plenty
out there, and some companies offer alternatives to Portland's cement uh,
(18:20):
creating their own type of cement using stuff like landfill waste,
which really the biggest one that I've seen is fly ash. Essentially,
that's what's left after you've put stuff through an incinerator.
So if you incinerate uh garbage, then you end up
with this ash material. That stuff can actually be used
to create cement. So if you're going to be incinerating anyway,
(18:43):
not necessarily the best way to get rid of garbage. Again,
we're shuffling things around a little bit, but you can
at least take that byproduct that's going to exist whether
you use it or not, and put it to use. Uh.
They're also mixtures that use fly ash that actually require
less water than Portland's cement, So then you can have
some water conservation in there um and they can also
(19:05):
be more resilient, so there are some bonuses there. Then
we've got some other kind of cool but not necessarily uh,
environmentally beneficial versions of concrete, translucent concrete being one of them.
Have you guys ever seen translucent concrete? Now seen pictures
of it. All you have to do is go to
(19:26):
Epcot and Walt Disney World. You will see translucent concrete
if you stick around long enough. That might sound kind
of crazy. Translucent concrete. How could you see through it?
I mean, concrete seems like the very definition of opaque,
and from what I understand, the concrete itself remains opaque.
The issue is that it's embedded with fiber optic material.
You put a ton of fiber optics, fiber optics inside
(19:47):
the concrete itself, which will allow light to transfer from
one side to the other. So it's kind of like
trans translucent concrete, but we're cheating a bit. It would
be like saying that your wall is translucent because you've
cut some whole in it and you can look through.
But what they're doing is they're using these fiber optics.
It allows light to transfer from insight to outside, and
it creates a much warmer environment than your classic cold concrete.
(20:12):
So imagine a building where you're getting some natural light
coming in. It's supplementing the light in the area. It's
creating a warmer, more welcoming in uh a place than
you would if you just had cinder block walls. Yeah,
Like like the glow cloud, it just fills every environment
with a sense of peace, all hail. So I mentioned
(20:34):
that you can see these at EPCOT. At Epcut, they
have sidewalks that have uh these translucent concrete uh pant
paving stones essentially, and they've got l e ed s
underneath that can shine through. Kids go nuts because at
night you start seeing these patterns and they can have
all these different shimmering lights that lights change color, so
(20:55):
it becomes this kind of interactive sidewalk. Not that it's
not really interactive, because it's all working on like a
pre programmed um uh pattern, but it's certainly more interactive
than a brick of concrete. Yeah, so kids love it.
I loved it. The first time I saw it. I
looked at thought, how did they do that? And then
I realized it's got to be fiber optic. Uh. And
(21:17):
then you came to understand and all the magic was
lost and yes, and then I saw, you know, I
saw the the young lady playing Mickey Mouse with the
head off in the back parking lot, and it just
all fell apart from me. No, actually, people, Mickey Mouse
is real. Forget I said anything in two thousand and four.
This was actually, um supposedly invented. I say supposedly invented
(21:38):
in two thousand and four, not that it wasn't invented,
but that we're not entirely sure this is actually the
origin of translucent concrete. But there was a Hungarian architecture.
There is an Hungarian architect by the name of Aaron Lass.
And I know I'm brutalizing that last name because I
don't speak Hungarian, but at any rate, uh, that was
the first person credited for creating this kind of concrete.
(22:01):
Beyond that, we've talked about this before, a self repairing
concrete or self healing concrete. UM. We mentioned that in
our December two episode about indestructible materials. We were wondering
if that was ever possible to truly create an indestructible material,
and we kind of discussed the fact that you're more
likely to build stuff that can repair itself somewhat after
(22:23):
we've damaged. UM. So, this kind of concrete typically has
one of two things in it, either some form of
polymer inside of it or some type of bacteria inside
of it. In both cases, the that material is activated
when it contacts water. So you've got some concrete a
crack forms, Water is going to find its way in
(22:43):
there because there's yes, you know, you've got a permeable surface.
When it contacts that polymer, then the polymer would swell,
thus plugging that crack. Or if it contacts bacteria, it's
the bacteria version. The bacteria start to produce do something
like calcium carbonate, which then fills up the cracks. So
(23:04):
in either case you have a system that is filling
up cracks. Overall, the the strength of the repaired material
is not quite as great as it would be without
the cracks at all, but it's more than enough to
suffice for whatever role you have it. That's the whole
purpose of it, and and to limit the damage that
(23:27):
could happen from an exposed crack that goes unplugged. Well,
that's a great segue to the next thing I wanted
to talk about, because this also involves the use of
bacteria to create minerals. Bacterial production or biogenic production of
calcium carbonate. Yeah, because right, I mean a lot of
bacteria honestly, are pretty lazy. You know, they don't help
(23:47):
you do the dishes. Uh, they never vacuum, right, But
but we can have them help us build concrete materials. Nice. Yes.
So there's a company originally out of North Carolina called
bio Mace a good name, boy, good name, which is
based on the idea of building bricks out of the
mineralization potential of micro organisms. Uh. The founder is named
(24:10):
Ginger Ginger Dosia, and she came up with the idea
by looking at the way coral reefs are built by
millions of tiny micro organisms. Yes, I I thought so too,
and and so one of the things she observes is
that the main structural ingredient of coral is going to
be calcium carbonate, which is a constituent of limestone, which,
(24:31):
if you'll recall from earlier, is a common ingredient and cement.
And so the bio mason process goes sort of like this.
You start with some sand and you place that in
a brick mold, and then you inject the sand with
bacteria colony but with the bacteria Spora sarcina pasteuria i
and these bacteria are natural producers of calcite. And then
(24:56):
you feed the bacteria slash sand mixture a diet of
calcium ions in water. Yeah, delicious, And this causes calcium
carbonate to form around the bacteria and makes the sand
particles stick together. Uh. It takes about two to five
days to grow a brick, that's what they call it.
But when the brick hardens into a solid brick, But
(25:17):
this doesn't really seem to be any longer than making
a clay brick in a kiln, and the process doesn't
directly require fuel, which is nice. Also the idea and
this is the coolest part to me is that you
don't have to make the bricks in one place and
then ship them. You can take them. You can essentially
make them on site with a powder or a syrup
containing the bacterial culture and the other key ingredients, using
(25:40):
your own sand and water locally sourced. So that ends
up saving you a ton on transportation costs since you're
just transporting the actual bacteria to the place that needs
to be and you can buy local for the sand
and and of course transportation emissions as well. Yeah. So
there's a lot of different potential ways to to decrease
(26:02):
the environmental impact of building material construction, but there's one
really cool potential application of an idea like this. I
started to think, wait a second, auto fabrication of building
materials on site. That sounds like you could have fantastic
implications in space exploration. And what do you know, NASA
is on it. Yeah. Yeah, So, in fact, I don't
(26:25):
know if this is still in the works, if it's
still likely to happen, but in the past, at least
in the past few years, some researchers at NASA and
elsewhere discussed the possibility of growing bacterial bricks for construction
projects on Mars. Uh, and so you might ask, wait
a minute, why can't you just ship your bricks to Mars.
If you have to ask that, you haven't been listening
(26:45):
to this show, but that's okay, maybe you're new. Uh,
it would be hilariously expensive and in terms of energy,
I think the term would be profligant. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Now we've we've also talked about not just the the
expense of shipping things, but the idea that uh, you
know that also is a domino effect, right, because you're
(27:06):
talking about having to use more rocket fuel to get things.
If this is a process where you don't need fuel
in the actual process itself, and you have a habitat
suitable for this bacteria to thrive in on the Martian landscape,
suddenly you have access to a building material production facility
(27:27):
on Mars itself. This is one of those things that's
really hard for us to imagine. Like most of our
most of the things we talked about when it comes
to Mars relate to how do you create a habitat
suitable for growing food? For example, We don't really think
beyond that. Most of what we talk about is that
that's the basic step. Yeah, but one exactly. But we
(27:48):
don't think about like how do we make a factory
on Mars? That that that seems like so far outside
the realm of possibility, but even how do we build
a permanent farm on Mars? Because really the best option
for farming for us is going to be able to
if we're able to build something underground. Uh. I guess
what's really great for building basements? Yeah, it could It
could very well be that this sort of this sort
(28:08):
of approach would allow us to shore up a a
underground um cavern, if you will, that would host the
habitats that that colony colonists would stay in because because
Mars has dirt a plenty. Yeah. So in October there
was an article a New Scientist I read this about
(28:29):
quote bug boxes for Mars missions. I like that name. Uh.
And these are collections of microorganisms. They'd weigh almost nothing,
and you can take them with you at very little
launch cost in terms of cargo. But they can create
colonies of microorganisms that multiply based on resources that are
available on the surface of Mars. And there are a
(28:50):
lot of possible advantages to synthetic biology. You could construct
building materials of course, but there are other things that
you can make food uh necessary chemicals like plastics and
anti freeze and stuff. You need to do science on Mars.
But but the creation of the building materials is the
one I wanted to focus on now. And it's similar
to the bio Mason idea. A team led by a
(29:11):
Brown graduate named Andre Bernier and that was advised by
Lynn Rothschild at the Ames Research Center a few years back.
They proposed a way of using that same bacterium I
mentioned earlier to to make bricks and mortar. And this
play on the idea that the bacterium converts urrea, which
is found in human urine, into ammonium, and the sammonium
(29:36):
increases the pH of the environment so that cements made
of calcium carbonate can actually form. It's not too acidic.
And so you p on the bacteria and they help
you make bricks out of the Martian gravel and soil.
The circle of life. It's beautiful. This is so much
cooler than that scene in water World, the the opener.
(29:57):
I don't remember what happened, oh I I just just
the very first thing you see in water World is
Kevin Costner like like peeing into a filtration device so
that he can drave so that he can drink water.
You know this is great too, because, like we were
talking about with the fly ash, you know, anytime you
can make use of a byproduct that is going to
be there anyway, that's that's good. Um. You know, some
(30:19):
time in some cases, like with the fly ash, you
might argue, while producing the fly ash is not necessarily
that great in the first place. So that's a different
argument where you say, how do we get off of
systems like incinerators where we're creating a lot of fly ash? Uh?
And that's that's equally important to have. But as long
as you do have it, you might as well be
able to put that stuff to use. And bacteria aren't
(30:40):
the only small organisms that are being investigated for this
kind of purpose, No, sure, how how about fungus. I
love a fungus. I do too. I like eating mushrooms,
and I would you know, I'd make a house out
of mushrooms. I could deal with that. That would be
a delicious house. You'd be a smurf. So the the
New York architecture firm called The Living which I think
(31:04):
that was the name of a Radiohead album somewhere back there.
But they're called the Living and they designed a forty
foot high tower called Hi Fi High with a y
I'm not sure why, made out of about ten thousand
bricks consisting of corn, fiber and my celium fungus. My
Celium is like the root structures that come out of
(31:26):
out of a mushroom, out of fungus. And this this
tower was displayed in the PS one courtyard of the
Museum of Modern Art in So wait a second, how
do you build a forty foot high tower out of mushrooms? Well,
with this technique, they made bricks. They made bricks with
mushroom binding agents. So the bricks were grown in molds
(31:48):
out of organic waste and then seeded with fungus to
bind it all together. The bricks took about five days
to harden into a solid shape. So they're organic. They're biodegradable,
which means they're They're probably not a good candidate for
constructing a skyscraper or something like that, but they could
be used for construction and buildings meant to last a
few years, like temporary structures, maybe at a festival or
(32:11):
fair ground or something like that. Sure, thing. Yeah, And
and these fungus, these fungus bound bricks, they can be
made without mind materials, without waste products, and without direct
carbon emissions. So I think that's a pretty cool idea.
They're still being developed, so i'd say you should look
out for more on this in the future. Another thing
that you might want to look out for is hemp composites. Yes,
(32:32):
hemp is in marijuana, that kind of thing. Indeed, friends,
um so okay, So so the inner like wood like
cores of hempstocks are called herds information I did not
know previously. It's you are herds, um. And these can
be processed and then mixed with minerals likelime or or
cement to create a building material that can actually be
(32:53):
carbon negative because the manufacturing process can be offset by
the growth of the hemp plants to begin with, um
and okay, like like honestly, y'all right now, most of
the information about architecture materials is being provided by private
companies who have a vested interest in making the stuff
sound really great. So I don't want to report any
facts and figures that that could be biased. It could
(33:17):
be a lot of cherry picking going on, right Well,
that's the thing we definitely get into with these ideas
about alternative building materials. So we've we've we know the
problems with the stuff most people are selling. But then
also a lot of the solutions are coming from people
who are trying to sell something as well. So it's
it's worth remembering even though they're preaching a message of sustainability,
(33:38):
which is a good thing you should always be wary of.
Oh yeah, yeah, And it's not that it's not that
we're saying that necessarily any of these people are are
are lying about stuff. You know. It probably they went
into this business because they believe strongly in the technology
that they're developing, and that's wonderful and beautiful. But you know,
you know, just just just watch out. Great critical thinking
(33:58):
is always good. Um. And I would say that's going
to be extremely interesting in the next few years as
perhaps laws specifically here in the US begin to allow
the grow the growth of HEMP two, to see whether
more companies start investigating this as a source. Now, I
will say I'm a little little worried because William Randolph
Hurst told me that any building mail of HEMP would
(34:22):
gradually drive me insane. Yeah, that that building, would pick
up an axe and slay your grandmother. That I would
also listen to jazz music, a whole bunch of stuff
to go along with it, jazz music. I think it's
time to talk about wool and seaweed Minecraft. What's building
out of wool? Tell me Minecraft? You can do Minecraft
(34:42):
pay Minecraft, but that's great, tell me about it. So, yeah,
you use you shears, and you shear sheep and then
you get a cubic meter. I don't know how a
sheep produces a cubic meter. Sometimes two cubic meters are
mystical and impressive creatures. But I have a question. I
(35:02):
have a question about Minecraft. In Minecraft, do materials have
um compression resistance properties? Well, so, like, if you build
a castle with a foundation made of wool, will that stand? Yes,
that part, that part of the COMPRESSIONI of wool is
not to be questioned. It is just as good as
as obsidian, which is the one of the strongest materials
(35:24):
in the game. However, they do have some compression effects
because now you can build with slime and it's bouncy.
But part in my cough in the background, you guys
couldn't see me. But but I was. I was laughing
so hard that I kind of started coughing over here.
Please please continue. Well, let's talk about actual real world
uses of well, because while I love building stuff with
(35:45):
wool in Minecraft, if there's a thunderstorm and lightning strikes it,
it goes up in flames. Oh no, well, no, I
do want to mention this. Not because this is the
one example of the brick that's going to save the future,
but there are all kinds of studies about how to
make better composite materials. Um you you know, and it's
a tradition that goes back to ancient times. You can
(36:06):
make a brick in the ancient world by mixing mud
and straw. There you've got a composite material, you've got
a binding agent, and you've got this straw in between
that helps strengthen it. Uh. And one of the things
that I came across that I thought was pretty interesting is,
uh this example of wool and seaweed. So in two
thousand and ten in the journal Construction and Building Materials,
(36:26):
there was an article called clay based composite stabilized with
natural polymer and fiber. And this was a cool experiment
that they found that for unfired earthen bricks are the
ones that you don't have to cook. You can significantly
increase compression resistance if you introduce a couple of things
al alginate. I'm assuming that's a hard g not alginate,
(36:49):
but it's alginate, which is a biomaterial found in the
cell walls of brown algae seaweed. This common brown seaweed
you see in the ocean um and keeps wool. And
these bricks were designed so they didn't have to be fired.
Like I said, that's an energy saver, and they can
be made from locally available excess biomaterials in the UK.
(37:09):
So you've got your sheep, you've got extra wool left
over from the textile industry, and then you've got your seaweed.
Nobody's really using that. You press all that together with
your with your earthen agent in the brick, and this
makes a much stronger brick. This is the thing that
is reminding me of other than Minecraft, is settlers of Catana. Suddenly,
(37:33):
suddenly sheep are becoming a building resource. Yeah, you don't
need that brick tile, you can just get some sheep
and some well, I guess there is no seaweed time. Well,
but you can turn your sheep into bricks. That this
is okay, I'm seeing the conversion there right. Uh. Well,
another thing, You could turn your sheep into bricks made
of animal blood. Wow, so you could that is the thing. Yeah,
(37:58):
you could build a cathede you roll out of animal blood.
Pretty sure, there's a nick cave and the bad seed
song coming out from here. Okay. So no, I want
to say that I think this experiment is not necessarily
the future. I really doubt we're going to have buildings
made entirely out of animal blood, except maybe as an
art project. But it's just too good of a principle
not to mention since it has been demonstrated the bricks
(38:20):
are made of animal blood. In two thousand twelve, uh,
there were some news stories about a British architect named
Jack Monroe who decided to experiment with creating building materials
out of about the ickeyst form of bio waste. You
can imagine fresh blood from slaughtered animals, and so this
kind of makes sense in a way. Actually, animal blood
(38:41):
is a prolific industrial byproduct that often goes to waste,
just discarded or incinerated and blood has components that encourage
bonding under the right circumstances. Like so, blood in the
past has been used as a type of glue um,
and so you look at that and you say, well,
maybe we could get some full, some some utility out
(39:02):
of this. And so Monroe claimed that he could make strong,
waterproof bricks with the following process. You mix fresh animal
blood with with an acid called E D t A,
which is a preservative agent. Not going to try to
pronounce the entire chemical name unless Jonathan, do you want
to try to say it? Man, I'm just looking at
it right now. Ask me again at the end of
(39:23):
the show. Ethylene dia mine to tapped for. It's almost there, yeah, yeah, yeah,
once you get you get to ethylena mine tetracetic acid,
ethylene diamine tetracetic acid. Not bad, yeah, not bad. Yeah.
So there you go. It's a preservative. It's used to
(39:44):
prevent the blood from growing some organisms in it which
you wouldn't want in the walls of your house, not necessarily.
And then you mix that blood with sand and then
you bake the mixture and you don't have to bake
it very hot seven degrees Celcie seventy degrees cels. Yes,
is good enough. That will work and will coagulate the
proteins in the blood. It holds the sand together in Bam,
(40:06):
you have a brick. Wow, somebody should somebody should make
something out of these bricks. This is really important, you guys.
I I wear a lot of black eyeliners sometimes, and
I absolutely need to see this in action. Yeah, I
I'm just every horror movie I've ever seen is starting
to come to mind right now, that too, especially the
(40:26):
ghost ones where the walls are bleeding. Um. But obviously
that's not what would happen with this stuff. That it
would all that would be the binding agent, just as
cement was with concrete. It's not like it would be
in any sort of liquid form. It would be completely solid. Uh.
It is an interesting point again, like the idea being
that if you have this byproduct that otherwise is going
(40:48):
to waste, if you can put it to use, isn't
that better than just throwing it out or incinerating it?
Now it comes down to, the uh, the kind of
stereotypical thing you would say out the the settlers of
America versus the Native Americans. The idea that the Native
Americans would use the entire buffalo. That's something that you
(41:09):
if you study the frontier stories of America, you often
hear that. Oh yeah, and it's even kind of popular
within the food movement these days. Is a return from
from you know, like snout to tail kind of dining
where if you're going to to kill an animal in
order to eat something, I mean a make it tasty
and and be use all the parts, even the weird
ones that people, especially in America these days, aren't used
(41:31):
to eating anymore. Yeah, So, I you know, it reminds
me actually of a story I saw that we had
a House to works Now article about recently, which is
using rejected tomatoes for energy, right, right, the idea of
being able to use something good enough to eat using
something that that for example, a tomato that has has
burst through the you know, when you're harvesting it, you
(41:52):
damage the tomato. You can't sell that, right, So but
if you can still make use of it, then that's
great because you're taking something that was once waste and
turning it into a resource. So, uh, while this definitely
is hitting me in certain psychological ways because I find
it kind of creepy just based upon my own personal feelings.
(42:14):
I totally appreciate the fact that, again, it's a waste
not want not kind of approach to creating building materials. Now,
we were just covering a small slice of potential future
building materials, specifically ones that have a biological component to them. Yeah,
I mean, we could do whole episodes probably on building
(42:37):
materials featuring editions of graphine or carbon nanotubes, polymers, getting
back into more of the the various advanced plastics that
are up there, advanced ceramics, yeah, yeah, ero gel yes,
aerojil is really fascinating stuff too. So we've got a
lot of other topics in this realm that we will
cover in the future. Obviously we're not we'll come back
(42:57):
to this. Yeah, we're not gonna do. I don't think
we're gonna do like three months of future of building materials,
but we will occasionally revisit this stuff. But that leads
me to another question. Guys, if you have a specific
type of topic, or maybe it's a large one like
building materials, and you would like to hear us start
to do a series on that, or maybe it's something
very particular and specific, just go ahead and send us
(43:19):
a question, but in order for us to be able
to answer it, we have to be able to read it.
So use this email address f W Thinking at how
Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on
Twitter or Facebook. At Twitter we are FW Thinking. You
can search FW thinking and Facebook. Our page will pop
right up. You can leave us a message there and
(43:39):
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go
(44:04):
Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says we don't
need no education. I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren, and I'm
(00:23):
Joe McCormick. It took me a minute to get that one. Well,
it's because of the double negative that always trips me up. Yeah. Hi,
We're gonna talk today about something that's that's related to
topics we've addressed in the past. Right, We've talked about
innovations in architecture and previous episodes of Forward Thinking. Today
we're going to kind of get a little more granular.
(00:43):
We're actually looking at the future of the materials we
use to build stuff, mostly annular like building. Was that
an aggregate pun? It could be, It wasn't intended to be.
But really, once you make a pun, either you intended
it or not, it's kind of the world. You've unleashed
it upon the world, the world to do with what
(01:06):
they will. Yeah, but we really have. We've talked about
lots of futuristic methods of putting together buildings. We've talked
about architecture, we've talked about three D printing of whole houses.
What else I mean, yes, the modular stuff that people
are exploring, you know, that the high quality, low environmental
impact pre fabrication that people are doing. Uh. And of course,
of course those techniques are going to help shape what
(01:28):
materials are used in the future. But let us talk
today about specifically those materials because material science is so
much fun. Let's get it down to a weird particulate level.
It's it's it's important too. When you think about it,
it's almost like everything is made out of materials. It's
almost like the universe is largely material in nature. Well,
(01:52):
just where you're living in a material world and you
are a material girl, you know, and you've got to
live in a material house. So thinking about materials is
very important when it comes to how we build our cities,
from the individual home to the skyscraper, especially to other
planet habitats. Oh sure, sure, but it's especially important to
(02:13):
think about all of that kind of stuff because the
things that we have been classically using throughout history to
construct our stuff is not sustainable, and it's especially going
to be less and less sustainable as the population and
especially the urban population grows. Yeah, so let's think about
some of the materials that we use most often to
build our building. So there's there's straw, there's sticks, right,
(02:38):
and there's bricks that keeps the wolves held at least
one of them. But no, no, no, no, no, let's
think like that. We got wood, you got steel, you've
got concrete. Those are big glass, brick and mortar. These
are these are the old stand bys, the hits. Sure, yeah,
not everyone lives in the yard, right, But there are
(02:58):
ways that we could think of too not only improve
our methods of using these these greatest hits of the
building materials catalog, but also to branch out into totally
different areas of coming up with hard, sturdy stuff to
make the walls around us out of. But before we
do that, I think we should look at what the
motivation for this discussion would be. I mean, you might
(03:19):
be thinking, well, I don't know what the heck is
wrong with concrete. We already make stuff out of concrete.
That seems fine. Why don't we just cover the whole
world in concrete? Yeah, why don't we make boats out
of concrete? Okay? Well, that one I think we can
we can more easily dismiss. But why don't we make
computers out of concrete? I'm just saying, you know, let's
let's talk about the problems the challenges we face relying
(03:44):
on a substance like concrete. Now, Now, first of all,
we have to admit concrete was an amazing technological achievement. Right.
Without concrete, the world would not be the way it is. Sure,
and uh so, concrete is made by binding together aggregate
material with water and cement. It's pretty straightforward. And aggregate
material could literally be anything from crushed shells to small
(04:07):
rocks to say, gravel, sandy, whatever. And while so, the
real technology we're talking about here is cement, the idea
of cement, And and what you say is correct. Cement
is an amazing technology that has made much of human
civilization possible. But it does have its problems. Uh For
one thing, it is incredibly energy intensive to produce. According
(04:30):
to the US Energy Information Administration, as of July, the
cement industry was the single most energy hungry of all
manufacturing industries in the United States. Yeah, and and that
that energy that it's using is not really green energy particularly, No,
it tends to rely heavily on coal and on petroleum
(04:52):
coke and coke that's not the soft drink, not the
stuff that is a refreshing way to taste the feeling
it is. However, the real thing it sort of is, Yeah,
it's a high carbon, low hydrogen petroleum residue. It's not
especially refreshing. The way you make coke typically is that
you put essentially put coal in an oven and you
(05:12):
heat coal up to a very high temperature and you
end up with this almost kind of it looks very
spongy and porous substance that is coke. So it's really
ah another stage of coal. It is a fossil fuel,
which means it has all the trappings of other fossil fuels,
(05:33):
including the fact that when you use it in combustion
or you use it in in in any kind of
firing capacity, you're releasing carbon. Right, And we'll talk about
that in just a minute. But back to the energy
consumption in According to that same e I A report,
the cement industry alone accounted for one quarter of one
percent of all US energy consumption. So you might be
(05:55):
thinking one quarter one Yeah, that doesn't sound like all
that much really, but you would be wrong. This is
just one single industry against the background of all transportation, heating, grid, energy, cars, everything,
And when you think about it in that in those terms,
that's huge. That's enormous, UH. And it represents, in the
(06:16):
words of that e i A report quote, a share
of national energy used roughly ten times its share of
the nation's gross output of goods and services on average,
other energy intensive industry's share of energy uses roughly twice
their share of gross output. So that that's comparing its
role in the economy to how much energy it consumes.
(06:37):
So it's real inefficient. Yeah, you might say that. So
So in other words, the value we get from the
production is uh does not necessarily justify the energy cost
of producing it uh compared to other types of products. Right, Well,
I mean you might say it justifies it. In the
cement is just ubiquitous around the world. It's one of
(06:59):
the most to use products out there. In the e
i A also predicted that increasing energy use from the
cement industry is going to continue into the future. It's
a growing trend. Yeah, I mean, as urbanization happens, as
we have talked about a lot, people like building urban
environments out of cement because it's dirty, and it's great. Yeah,
So why does cement use so much energy energy to produce?
(07:21):
What are what are they doing? Are they like do
they have to detonate a volcano every time? They every time?
It's like alternate Thursdays. Yeah, it's only for fun. Well
what is the process? So, so let's I'll get into
a little more detail with cement. So the most common
type of cement around the world is called Portland's cement.
So it enjoys coffee, beards and flannel. Why does it
(07:45):
require so much energy? Well, it's a chemical combination of
stuff like calcium silicon. Your just killing me with those
two thousand nine jokes. Look, I'm a product of my time,
and that's you know, the dead jokes are gonna be
related back by. But yes, it's it's a chemical combination
of stuff like calcium, silicon, aluminum, iron, and some other stuff.
(08:09):
Raw materials that are used to make cement include limestone, shells,
chalk and shale clay, slate, slag which is essentially runoff
from other manufacturing processes, uh, silica, sand, and iron ore.
So you take all these different ingredients, uh, and you
need to put them into a a furnace or a
(08:31):
kiln and subject them to incredibly high temperatures. Uh. The
people usually refer to this as like a heating and
firing process, and not just for a few minutes, So
it's for a very long sustained period, and it often
requires multiple heating and firing uh sessions. So it's not
like you put the stuff in, you turn the temperature
(08:52):
up to you know, a thousand degrees, and you walk
off in twenty minutes later, Hey you got some ent.
That's not the way it works now. So because you
have to heat the stuff up to such a high temperature,
that's where a lot of this energy consumption is coming from.
That you have to get the temperature up to a
certain level and sustain it for a good long while.
What's the point of heating it to such a high temperature?
(09:13):
What does it do? It turns this this collection of materials. Uh.
And again it's not like cement is going to contain
all of the things I listed, but it's going to
contain a collection of those things. It's gonna heat all
of that up and and it's going to end up
creating a substance that's sort of rock like. And this
is in fact cement but in order to make it usable,
(09:35):
you have to grind that stuff down into powder. So
that requires more energy obviously to convert the rock into
the powder version. That's what you end up mixing with
the aggregate and water. Uh and uh. It becomes the
binding agents. So that's dry cement. If you were to
mix water with that, you would get wet cement. And
um uh. That is part of why it requires so
(09:57):
much energy. There's another component of energy. It isn't addressed
by this process, but it is in fact a very
important thing that we have to keep in mind and
something that that Joe you wrote about in the video
episode we did on this subject. That's the fact that
not only do you have to put in a lot
of energy to produce cement, but then you have to
use even more energy to get it to where it
needs to go. Right, So you're actually spending even more
(10:21):
energy to transport this finished product because you just made
powdered rocks. Those aren't light, right, I mean, I mean
even I mean it's lighter than than than wet rock.
By the by the subtraction of the they should shift
the cement wet. Well, it's my idea on top of
the fact that it's heavy cement trucks. I mean they
(10:41):
do that sometimes on top of the and you've got
to pour that cement out by a certain amount of
time or else it becomes dry in one of the
cement trucks, and that's a mess. But there's a MythBusters
episode blow up. Yeah, it was pretty impressive. But I
was gonna I was gonna add that not only is
it heavy, but your average construction project needs a crap
(11:02):
ton of the stuff. Right, So it is a non
trivial issue that not only does it take a lot
of energy to create this stuff, it takes a lot
of energy to get it to where it needs to be. Well,
let let's let us emphasize how non trivial this is.
So we mentioned earlier that there are carbon emissions. Exactly
how much do we know? Well, according to a group
of studies that was conducted through Columbia University CIRCA. Collectively,
(11:27):
this group of studies was called State of the Planet.
If you want to look it up, it's pretty fascinating. Um,
the cement industry is responsible for five per cent of
global carbon dioxide emissions. On one industry responsible for five Yeah,
and part of that part of the reason there is
that we are using so much cement. I mean, okay,
look like we've we said that. We said this like
(11:48):
kind of in passing, but to give to give you
a number. According to a report from two thousand nine
from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, concrete is
the second most consumed TiAl in the world every year,
after only water, and by consumed, I don't mean that
we're all rock biters. I just mean that that we're
making a lot of it and we're putting a lot
(12:09):
of it. Tease. Well, this rock biter would like to
issue a little defense because I don't think that our
purpose today is to say, hey, we need to stop
using cement to make concrete to make our buildings. That
that's not exactly the point. But I would say that
if we can replace some portion of our share of
traditional cement and concrete with better, more sustainable materials that
(12:33):
create structures that are just too safe and get the
job done, that would be a very good thing. This
this fell core agrees with you. Rock biter isn't just
a fun insult. It's it's it's a reference to story alright,
So never ending story references aside and trust me, we
could do an entire podcast of them. What is the
(12:54):
future of never ending story references? Apparently it will go
on forever based upon the title. Uh so at any rate, Well,
let's let's talk about some ways to make concrete more sustainable,
or to make concrete last even longer, so it helps
justify the process of making it in the first place. Right,
(13:16):
So if we can either make better concrete where it
requires less energy to create, or we make concrete that
lasts longer, so therefore the investment we make is quote
unquote worth it. Uh that's the first step. So let
me talk about a few of those. So one thing
we can look at is are there ways to make
concrete itself better, right as opposed to going to a
(13:38):
complete alternative. Are there things that we can do that
either make concrete last longer so therefore the energy investment
that we make at the beginning pays off over a
longer amount of time, or that we can decrease the
the ecological impact of creating the concrete in the first place.
So we started looking into some of this stuff. One
(13:58):
of the thing we wanted to talk about was the
ability to make stronger types of concrete so this idea
that it could last a longer time, we could hold
a greater load. I read a lot of very cynical
UH forum posts from people who work in the concrete
business and talked about different alternatives to your standard approach
to a concrete mix for stuff like roads or sidewalks,
(14:21):
And it almost always came into like a thing where
we said we would recommend using this particular type of
mixture because it would last a longer amount of time,
and the response we would get back is, but we
need to have a job in ten years, so we
want to make sure we have to replace this. Yeah.
I don't know how serious they were being, but there
(14:41):
was that. I was seeing it pop up in multiple
forums as I was looking into this. By the way,
people who work with concrete they are a very funny
group that has an incredibly dry sense of humor. Anyway,
concrete tends to be very very resistant to compression. Like
it's good at standing up to compression, but not so
(15:02):
much with ten stile strength. In other words, when you're
pulling along UH concrete, it tends to tear apart unless
you mix it with something else. So one way to
make stronger concrete is to increase the amount of cement
you add. But we just talked about how cement is
an energy intensive material. Right to to create cement, but
if you if you want to make stronger concrete, you
(15:24):
could add more cement to your cement to aggregate ratio.
For example, some people might say, instead of making that
a four bag mix, make it a five bag mix.
In other words, adding an extra bag of cement for
the same volume of some of concrete. So adding more
cement is not necessarily the best choice, but you can
do other things, like you can create mixtures in the
(15:47):
concrete that increase its strength. For example, carbon fibers. We've
talked about these. They're very lightweight, they have incredible strength.
They specifically will add ten stile strength to UH to
a material UH. If you do at with concrete, you
get what is called fibra rated concrete. It's a weird
word because it's not really a word, but that's what
(16:07):
they call it in the bizes And I guess. So
they also have polymer concrete, so they're adding polymers. Those
are those long chain molecules. We've talked about, plastic being
the famous polymer um and they'll use polymers to either
offset or even completely replaced cement as the binding agent.
So you could have a concrete where polymers are the binder,
(16:29):
not cement, and that is potentially better, But again it
depends on how you're producing the polymers. If it's all
petroleum based, you're really just again shifting some stuff over.
It may not be a net gain. Part of the
issue here is that if you can't make it an
an affordable alternative to the pre existing approach of concrete,
(16:52):
then from a financial standpoint, it's very hard to justify. Right.
If you're a company and you're looking to make a
profit out of building a project for a customer, then
one of the ways you can maximize your profits is
minimizing your costs. And while it might make more environmental
sense to go with a different material, it might make
(17:12):
less financial sense. And money makes the world go round.
Not to get totally cynical, but and of course there
are some some design firms out there who say, uh, look,
we build that into our price. You're gonna be paying
a higher price, but you're also going to know that
you're you're building isn't going to have the same environmental
impact as the one across the street. And for some
(17:33):
people that's true, yes, and it might last longer. It's
a great point. So let's talk about greener concrete. Now.
One thing you need to know is if you do
a Google search for green concrete, one of the things
that pops up is the fact that green concrete doesn't
necessarily mean eco friendly concrete because the American Concrete Institute
uses the term green concrete to mean concrete that is
(17:56):
hardened or there's the set but not yet hardened. Essentially,
it's like it's like when you're saying someone is green,
you know, being meaning that they haven't become a seasoned
veteran or whatever in this yeah, exactly exactly, so not
fully ripe. That doesn't mean that there aren't folks trying
to make a more eco friendly concrete. There are plenty
out there, and some companies offer alternatives to Portland's cement uh,
(18:20):
creating their own type of cement using stuff like landfill waste,
which really the biggest one that I've seen is fly ash. Essentially,
that's what's left after you've put stuff through an incinerator.
So if you incinerate uh garbage, then you end up
with this ash material. That stuff can actually be used
to create cement. So if you're going to be incinerating anyway,
(18:43):
not necessarily the best way to get rid of garbage. Again,
we're shuffling things around a little bit, but you can
at least take that byproduct that's going to exist whether
you use it or not, and put it to use. Uh.
They're also mixtures that use fly ash that actually require
less water than Portland's cement, So then you can have
some water conservation in there um and they can also
(19:05):
be more resilient, so there are some bonuses there. Then
we've got some other kind of cool but not necessarily uh,
environmentally beneficial versions of concrete, translucent concrete being one of them.
Have you guys ever seen translucent concrete? Now seen pictures
of it. All you have to do is go to
(19:26):
Epcot and Walt Disney World. You will see translucent concrete
if you stick around long enough. That might sound kind
of crazy. Translucent concrete. How could you see through it?
I mean, concrete seems like the very definition of opaque,
and from what I understand, the concrete itself remains opaque.
The issue is that it's embedded with fiber optic material.
You put a ton of fiber optics, fiber optics inside
(19:47):
the concrete itself, which will allow light to transfer from
one side to the other. So it's kind of like
trans translucent concrete, but we're cheating a bit. It would
be like saying that your wall is translucent because you've
cut some whole in it and you can look through.
But what they're doing is they're using these fiber optics.
It allows light to transfer from insight to outside, and
it creates a much warmer environment than your classic cold concrete.
(20:12):
So imagine a building where you're getting some natural light
coming in. It's supplementing the light in the area. It's
creating a warmer, more welcoming in uh a place than
you would if you just had cinder block walls. Yeah,
Like like the glow cloud, it just fills every environment
with a sense of peace, all hail. So I mentioned
(20:34):
that you can see these at EPCOT. At Epcut, they
have sidewalks that have uh these translucent concrete uh pant
paving stones essentially, and they've got l e ed s
underneath that can shine through. Kids go nuts because at
night you start seeing these patterns and they can have
all these different shimmering lights that lights change color, so
(20:55):
it becomes this kind of interactive sidewalk. Not that it's
not really interactive, because it's all working on like a
pre programmed um uh pattern, but it's certainly more interactive
than a brick of concrete. Yeah, so kids love it.
I loved it. The first time I saw it. I
looked at thought, how did they do that? And then
I realized it's got to be fiber optic. Uh. And
(21:17):
then you came to understand and all the magic was
lost and yes, and then I saw, you know, I
saw the the young lady playing Mickey Mouse with the
head off in the back parking lot, and it just
all fell apart from me. No, actually, people, Mickey Mouse
is real. Forget I said anything in two thousand and four.
This was actually, um supposedly invented. I say supposedly invented
(21:38):
in two thousand and four, not that it wasn't invented,
but that we're not entirely sure this is actually the
origin of translucent concrete. But there was a Hungarian architecture.
There is an Hungarian architect by the name of Aaron Lass.
And I know I'm brutalizing that last name because I
don't speak Hungarian, but at any rate, uh, that was
the first person credited for creating this kind of concrete.
(22:01):
Beyond that, we've talked about this before, a self repairing
concrete or self healing concrete. UM. We mentioned that in
our December two episode about indestructible materials. We were wondering
if that was ever possible to truly create an indestructible material,
and we kind of discussed the fact that you're more
likely to build stuff that can repair itself somewhat after
(22:23):
we've damaged. UM. So, this kind of concrete typically has
one of two things in it, either some form of
polymer inside of it or some type of bacteria inside
of it. In both cases, the that material is activated
when it contacts water. So you've got some concrete a
crack forms, Water is going to find its way in
(22:43):
there because there's yes, you know, you've got a permeable surface.
When it contacts that polymer, then the polymer would swell,
thus plugging that crack. Or if it contacts bacteria, it's
the bacteria version. The bacteria start to produce do something
like calcium carbonate, which then fills up the cracks. So
(23:04):
in either case you have a system that is filling
up cracks. Overall, the the strength of the repaired material
is not quite as great as it would be without
the cracks at all, but it's more than enough to
suffice for whatever role you have it. That's the whole
purpose of it, and and to limit the damage that
(23:27):
could happen from an exposed crack that goes unplugged. Well,
that's a great segue to the next thing I wanted
to talk about, because this also involves the use of
bacteria to create minerals. Bacterial production or biogenic production of
calcium carbonate. Yeah, because right, I mean a lot of
bacteria honestly, are pretty lazy. You know, they don't help
(23:47):
you do the dishes. Uh, they never vacuum, right, But
but we can have them help us build concrete materials. Nice. Yes.
So there's a company originally out of North Carolina called
bio Mace a good name, boy, good name, which is
based on the idea of building bricks out of the
mineralization potential of micro organisms. Uh. The founder is named
(24:10):
Ginger Ginger Dosia, and she came up with the idea
by looking at the way coral reefs are built by
millions of tiny micro organisms. Yes, I I thought so too,
and and so one of the things she observes is
that the main structural ingredient of coral is going to
be calcium carbonate, which is a constituent of limestone, which,
(24:31):
if you'll recall from earlier, is a common ingredient and cement.
And so the bio mason process goes sort of like this.
You start with some sand and you place that in
a brick mold, and then you inject the sand with
bacteria colony but with the bacteria Spora sarcina pasteuria i
and these bacteria are natural producers of calcite. And then
(24:56):
you feed the bacteria slash sand mixture a diet of
calcium ions in water. Yeah, delicious, And this causes calcium
carbonate to form around the bacteria and makes the sand
particles stick together. Uh. It takes about two to five
days to grow a brick, that's what they call it.
But when the brick hardens into a solid brick, But
(25:17):
this doesn't really seem to be any longer than making
a clay brick in a kiln, and the process doesn't
directly require fuel, which is nice. Also the idea and
this is the coolest part to me is that you
don't have to make the bricks in one place and
then ship them. You can take them. You can essentially
make them on site with a powder or a syrup
containing the bacterial culture and the other key ingredients, using
(25:40):
your own sand and water locally sourced. So that ends
up saving you a ton on transportation costs since you're
just transporting the actual bacteria to the place that needs
to be and you can buy local for the sand
and and of course transportation emissions as well. Yeah. So
there's a lot of different potential ways to to decrease
(26:02):
the environmental impact of building material construction, but there's one
really cool potential application of an idea like this. I
started to think, wait a second, auto fabrication of building
materials on site. That sounds like you could have fantastic
implications in space exploration. And what do you know, NASA
is on it. Yeah. Yeah, So, in fact, I don't
(26:25):
know if this is still in the works, if it's
still likely to happen, but in the past, at least
in the past few years, some researchers at NASA and
elsewhere discussed the possibility of growing bacterial bricks for construction
projects on Mars. Uh, and so you might ask, wait
a minute, why can't you just ship your bricks to Mars.
If you have to ask that, you haven't been listening
(26:45):
to this show, but that's okay, maybe you're new. Uh,
it would be hilariously expensive and in terms of energy,
I think the term would be profligant. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Now we've we've also talked about not just the the
expense of shipping things, but the idea that uh, you
know that also is a domino effect, right, because you're
(27:06):
talking about having to use more rocket fuel to get things.
If this is a process where you don't need fuel
in the actual process itself, and you have a habitat
suitable for this bacteria to thrive in on the Martian landscape,
suddenly you have access to a building material production facility
(27:27):
on Mars itself. This is one of those things that's
really hard for us to imagine. Like most of our
most of the things we talked about when it comes
to Mars relate to how do you create a habitat
suitable for growing food? For example, We don't really think
beyond that. Most of what we talk about is that
that's the basic step. Yeah, but one exactly. But we
(27:48):
don't think about like how do we make a factory
on Mars? That that that seems like so far outside
the realm of possibility, but even how do we build
a permanent farm on Mars? Because really the best option
for farming for us is going to be able to
if we're able to build something underground. Uh. I guess
what's really great for building basements? Yeah, it could It
could very well be that this sort of this sort
(28:08):
of approach would allow us to shore up a a
underground um cavern, if you will, that would host the
habitats that that colony colonists would stay in because because
Mars has dirt a plenty. Yeah. So in October there
was an article a New Scientist I read this about
(28:29):
quote bug boxes for Mars missions. I like that name. Uh.
And these are collections of microorganisms. They'd weigh almost nothing,
and you can take them with you at very little
launch cost in terms of cargo. But they can create
colonies of microorganisms that multiply based on resources that are
available on the surface of Mars. And there are a
(28:50):
lot of possible advantages to synthetic biology. You could construct
building materials of course, but there are other things that
you can make food uh necessary chemicals like plastics and
anti freeze and stuff. You need to do science on Mars.
But but the creation of the building materials is the
one I wanted to focus on now. And it's similar
to the bio Mason idea. A team led by a
(29:11):
Brown graduate named Andre Bernier and that was advised by
Lynn Rothschild at the Ames Research Center a few years back.
They proposed a way of using that same bacterium I
mentioned earlier to to make bricks and mortar. And this
play on the idea that the bacterium converts urrea, which
is found in human urine, into ammonium, and the sammonium
(29:36):
increases the pH of the environment so that cements made
of calcium carbonate can actually form. It's not too acidic.
And so you p on the bacteria and they help
you make bricks out of the Martian gravel and soil.
The circle of life. It's beautiful. This is so much
cooler than that scene in water World, the the opener.
(29:57):
I don't remember what happened, oh I I just just
the very first thing you see in water World is
Kevin Costner like like peeing into a filtration device so
that he can drave so that he can drink water.
You know this is great too, because, like we were
talking about with the fly ash, you know, anytime you
can make use of a byproduct that is going to
be there anyway, that's that's good. Um. You know, some
(30:19):
time in some cases, like with the fly ash, you
might argue, while producing the fly ash is not necessarily
that great in the first place. So that's a different
argument where you say, how do we get off of
systems like incinerators where we're creating a lot of fly ash? Uh?
And that's that's equally important to have. But as long
as you do have it, you might as well be
able to put that stuff to use. And bacteria aren't
(30:40):
the only small organisms that are being investigated for this
kind of purpose, No, sure, how how about fungus. I
love a fungus. I do too. I like eating mushrooms,
and I would you know, I'd make a house out
of mushrooms. I could deal with that. That would be
a delicious house. You'd be a smurf. So the the
New York architecture firm called The Living which I think
(31:04):
that was the name of a Radiohead album somewhere back there.
But they're called the Living and they designed a forty
foot high tower called Hi Fi High with a y
I'm not sure why, made out of about ten thousand
bricks consisting of corn, fiber and my celium fungus. My
Celium is like the root structures that come out of
(31:26):
out of a mushroom, out of fungus. And this this
tower was displayed in the PS one courtyard of the
Museum of Modern Art in So wait a second, how
do you build a forty foot high tower out of mushrooms? Well,
with this technique, they made bricks. They made bricks with
mushroom binding agents. So the bricks were grown in molds
(31:48):
out of organic waste and then seeded with fungus to
bind it all together. The bricks took about five days
to harden into a solid shape. So they're organic. They're biodegradable,
which means they're They're probably not a good candidate for
constructing a skyscraper or something like that, but they could
be used for construction and buildings meant to last a
few years, like temporary structures, maybe at a festival or
(32:11):
fair ground or something like that. Sure, thing. Yeah, And
and these fungus, these fungus bound bricks, they can be
made without mind materials, without waste products, and without direct
carbon emissions. So I think that's a pretty cool idea.
They're still being developed, so i'd say you should look
out for more on this in the future. Another thing
that you might want to look out for is hemp composites. Yes,
(32:32):
hemp is in marijuana, that kind of thing. Indeed, friends,
um so okay, So so the inner like wood like
cores of hempstocks are called herds information I did not
know previously. It's you are herds, um. And these can
be processed and then mixed with minerals likelime or or
cement to create a building material that can actually be
(32:53):
carbon negative because the manufacturing process can be offset by
the growth of the hemp plants to begin with, um
and okay, like like honestly, y'all right now, most of
the information about architecture materials is being provided by private
companies who have a vested interest in making the stuff
sound really great. So I don't want to report any
facts and figures that that could be biased. It could
(33:17):
be a lot of cherry picking going on, right Well,
that's the thing we definitely get into with these ideas
about alternative building materials. So we've we've we know the
problems with the stuff most people are selling. But then
also a lot of the solutions are coming from people
who are trying to sell something as well. So it's
it's worth remembering even though they're preaching a message of sustainability,
(33:38):
which is a good thing you should always be wary of.
Oh yeah, yeah, And it's not that it's not that
we're saying that necessarily any of these people are are
are lying about stuff. You know. It probably they went
into this business because they believe strongly in the technology
that they're developing, and that's wonderful and beautiful. But you know,
you know, just just just watch out. Great critical thinking
(33:58):
is always good. Um. And I would say that's going
to be extremely interesting in the next few years as
perhaps laws specifically here in the US begin to allow
the grow the growth of HEMP two, to see whether
more companies start investigating this as a source. Now, I
will say I'm a little little worried because William Randolph
Hurst told me that any building mail of HEMP would
(34:22):
gradually drive me insane. Yeah, that that building, would pick
up an axe and slay your grandmother. That I would
also listen to jazz music, a whole bunch of stuff
to go along with it, jazz music. I think it's
time to talk about wool and seaweed Minecraft. What's building
out of wool? Tell me Minecraft? You can do Minecraft
(34:42):
pay Minecraft, but that's great, tell me about it. So, yeah,
you use you shears, and you shear sheep and then
you get a cubic meter. I don't know how a
sheep produces a cubic meter. Sometimes two cubic meters are
mystical and impressive creatures. But I have a question. I
(35:02):
have a question about Minecraft. In Minecraft, do materials have
um compression resistance properties? Well, so, like, if you build
a castle with a foundation made of wool, will that stand? Yes,
that part, that part of the COMPRESSIONI of wool is
not to be questioned. It is just as good as
as obsidian, which is the one of the strongest materials
(35:24):
in the game. However, they do have some compression effects
because now you can build with slime and it's bouncy.
But part in my cough in the background, you guys
couldn't see me. But but I was. I was laughing
so hard that I kind of started coughing over here.
Please please continue. Well, let's talk about actual real world
uses of well, because while I love building stuff with
(35:45):
wool in Minecraft, if there's a thunderstorm and lightning strikes it,
it goes up in flames. Oh no, well, no, I
do want to mention this. Not because this is the
one example of the brick that's going to save the future,
but there are all kinds of studies about how to
make better composite materials. Um you you know, and it's
a tradition that goes back to ancient times. You can
(36:06):
make a brick in the ancient world by mixing mud
and straw. There you've got a composite material, you've got
a binding agent, and you've got this straw in between
that helps strengthen it. Uh. And one of the things
that I came across that I thought was pretty interesting is,
uh this example of wool and seaweed. So in two
thousand and ten in the journal Construction and Building Materials,
(36:26):
there was an article called clay based composite stabilized with
natural polymer and fiber. And this was a cool experiment
that they found that for unfired earthen bricks are the
ones that you don't have to cook. You can significantly
increase compression resistance if you introduce a couple of things
al alginate. I'm assuming that's a hard g not alginate,
(36:49):
but it's alginate, which is a biomaterial found in the
cell walls of brown algae seaweed. This common brown seaweed
you see in the ocean um and keeps wool. And
these bricks were designed so they didn't have to be fired.
Like I said, that's an energy saver, and they can
be made from locally available excess biomaterials in the UK.
(37:09):
So you've got your sheep, you've got extra wool left
over from the textile industry, and then you've got your seaweed.
Nobody's really using that. You press all that together with
your with your earthen agent in the brick, and this
makes a much stronger brick. This is the thing that
is reminding me of other than Minecraft, is settlers of Catana. Suddenly,
(37:33):
suddenly sheep are becoming a building resource. Yeah, you don't
need that brick tile, you can just get some sheep
and some well, I guess there is no seaweed time. Well,
but you can turn your sheep into bricks. That this
is okay, I'm seeing the conversion there right. Uh. Well,
another thing, You could turn your sheep into bricks made
of animal blood. Wow, so you could that is the thing. Yeah,
(37:58):
you could build a cathede you roll out of animal blood.
Pretty sure, there's a nick cave and the bad seed
song coming out from here. Okay. So no, I want
to say that I think this experiment is not necessarily
the future. I really doubt we're going to have buildings
made entirely out of animal blood, except maybe as an
art project. But it's just too good of a principle
not to mention since it has been demonstrated the bricks
(38:20):
are made of animal blood. In two thousand twelve, uh,
there were some news stories about a British architect named
Jack Monroe who decided to experiment with creating building materials
out of about the ickeyst form of bio waste. You
can imagine fresh blood from slaughtered animals, and so this
kind of makes sense in a way. Actually, animal blood
(38:41):
is a prolific industrial byproduct that often goes to waste,
just discarded or incinerated and blood has components that encourage
bonding under the right circumstances. Like so, blood in the
past has been used as a type of glue um,
and so you look at that and you say, well,
maybe we could get some full, some some utility out
(39:02):
of this. And so Monroe claimed that he could make strong,
waterproof bricks with the following process. You mix fresh animal
blood with with an acid called E D t A,
which is a preservative agent. Not going to try to
pronounce the entire chemical name unless Jonathan, do you want
to try to say it? Man, I'm just looking at
it right now. Ask me again at the end of
(39:23):
the show. Ethylene dia mine to tapped for. It's almost there, yeah, yeah, yeah,
once you get you get to ethylena mine tetracetic acid,
ethylene diamine tetracetic acid. Not bad, yeah, not bad. Yeah.
So there you go. It's a preservative. It's used to
(39:44):
prevent the blood from growing some organisms in it which
you wouldn't want in the walls of your house, not necessarily.
And then you mix that blood with sand and then
you bake the mixture and you don't have to bake
it very hot seven degrees Celcie seventy degrees cels. Yes,
is good enough. That will work and will coagulate the
proteins in the blood. It holds the sand together in Bam,
(40:06):
you have a brick. Wow, somebody should somebody should make
something out of these bricks. This is really important, you guys.
I I wear a lot of black eyeliners sometimes, and
I absolutely need to see this in action. Yeah, I
I'm just every horror movie I've ever seen is starting
to come to mind right now, that too, especially the
(40:26):
ghost ones where the walls are bleeding. Um. But obviously
that's not what would happen with this stuff. That it
would all that would be the binding agent, just as
cement was with concrete. It's not like it would be
in any sort of liquid form. It would be completely solid. Uh.
It is an interesting point again, like the idea being
that if you have this byproduct that otherwise is going
(40:48):
to waste, if you can put it to use, isn't
that better than just throwing it out or incinerating it?
Now it comes down to, the uh, the kind of
stereotypical thing you would say out the the settlers of
America versus the Native Americans. The idea that the Native
Americans would use the entire buffalo. That's something that you
(41:09):
if you study the frontier stories of America, you often
hear that. Oh yeah, and it's even kind of popular
within the food movement these days. Is a return from
from you know, like snout to tail kind of dining
where if you're going to to kill an animal in
order to eat something, I mean a make it tasty
and and be use all the parts, even the weird
ones that people, especially in America these days, aren't used
(41:31):
to eating anymore. Yeah, So, I you know, it reminds
me actually of a story I saw that we had
a House to works Now article about recently, which is
using rejected tomatoes for energy, right, right, the idea of
being able to use something good enough to eat using
something that that for example, a tomato that has has
burst through the you know, when you're harvesting it, you
(41:52):
damage the tomato. You can't sell that, right, So but
if you can still make use of it, then that's
great because you're taking something that was once waste and
turning it into a resource. So, uh, while this definitely
is hitting me in certain psychological ways because I find
it kind of creepy just based upon my own personal feelings.
(42:14):
I totally appreciate the fact that, again, it's a waste
not want not kind of approach to creating building materials. Now,
we were just covering a small slice of potential future
building materials, specifically ones that have a biological component to them. Yeah,
I mean, we could do whole episodes probably on building
(42:37):
materials featuring editions of graphine or carbon nanotubes, polymers, getting
back into more of the the various advanced plastics that
are up there, advanced ceramics, yeah, yeah, ero gel yes,
aerojil is really fascinating stuff too. So we've got a
lot of other topics in this realm that we will
cover in the future. Obviously we're not we'll come back
(42:57):
to this. Yeah, we're not gonna do. I don't think
we're gonna do like three months of future of building materials,
but we will occasionally revisit this stuff. But that leads
me to another question. Guys, if you have a specific
type of topic, or maybe it's a large one like
building materials, and you would like to hear us start
to do a series on that, or maybe it's something
very particular and specific, just go ahead and send us
(43:19):
a question, but in order for us to be able
to answer it, we have to be able to read it.
So use this email address f W Thinking at how
Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on
Twitter or Facebook. At Twitter we are FW Thinking. You
can search FW thinking and Facebook. Our page will pop
right up. You can leave us a message there and
(43:39):
we will talk to you again really soon. For more
on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward
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