Would You Live In A House Built From Sewage?

Most people do n’t take the reflection “ shitting bricks ” literally , butDr Abbas Mohajeraniis an exception . He ’s developed a technology to make dependable , smell - free brick out of sewage , work out two problem at once . Turns out , to add together to the little pigs ' business firm of drinking straw and wood , we could have made one out of poop .

With more than 7   billion people on the planet , the world produces a lot of waste . After process in treatment facilities , we ’re left with what is tactfully known as biosolids . Some biosolids are used to fertilise plants no one will eat , such as timber grove , but there are concerns about using them on intellectual nourishment crops . As a result , about 30 pct of the biosolids in the world are institutionalize to landfill or pile up while we attempt to discover use for them .

Mohajerani , who works at Australia ’s RMIT University , fired the biosolids into bricks and found that if you may get over the yuck cistron , they have some major reward over traditional clay .

“ More than 3 billion cubic metres of clay soil is dug up each year for the ball-shaped brickmaking industry , to produce about 1.5 trillion brick , ” Mohajerani allege in astatement .

Mohajerani question if the 9 million t of biosolids make in the EU , or 7 million from the US each year , could be turn to brick , removing the problem of biosolid garbage disposal and reducing emergence with existing brick manufacturing . He combined traditional brick materials with biosolids to develop bricks that were 10 , 15 , 20 , and 25 per centum biosolid and tested the performance of each .

In the compeer - reviewed journalBuildings , Mohajerani announce his work was more successful than anyone might have expected . For one thing , it requires almost half as much energy to terminate a 25 percent biosolid brick as a conventional one . best still , the partly biosolid bricks are more holey and therefore less thermally conductive . building build out of them will want less heat and cooling .

Biosolids often contain heavy metals ( something you might not want to think about too severely ) , but Mohajerani found most were   immobilized by the firing , so the peril of leaching when it rains is minimal .

If Mohajerani ’s theme ever consider off in his menage metropolis , it could give a whole new meaning to the cult Facebook pageShit Brick Fences Of Melbourne , and make live on in a shit home not such a bad thing .