New Eco-Bricks: Clay vs. Poo
Well, it’s official: the construction industry has gone to poop. Well, cow dung, to be more exact. Students at the Prasetiya Mulya Business School in Indonesia won Berkeley’s Global Social Venture Competition at the University of California with their discovery and invention of utilizing cow dung instead of clay to make bricks.
The idea came from the business school students as a way to innovate building materials in their country, where clay for brick-making is fairly scarce, yet cow droppings run aplenty.
The dung is not only used to make the building materials, it is also used in the firing of the bricks. The poo blocks are called EcoFaeBrick - eco because they are environmentally friendly and fae because they use “faeces.” By making bricks out of cow poop we save the earth from the damage caused by mining clay out of the ground and we save trees by using the dung’s methane gas to fire the bricks instead of firewood.
But how do the poop packages stack up to clay cubes? The EcoFaeBrick is actually 20 percent lighter in weight than clay brick, making it easier to transport, easier to handle, and surprisingly stronger than traditional bricks.
The eco-friendly bricks are a bit cheaper to produce than clay bricks, but consumers will find that they cost about the same in the building supplies marketplace.
The EcoFaeBrick also helps to alleviate other woes in the world. Not only are they a friendlier product to manufacture and use, when compared to clay brick, they are also a means by which farmers can make a little extra income. The bricks, naturally, rely on cattle farmers to collect and sell their dung to the brick producers. A little extra green in their pockets could go a long way to helping farmers keep afloat in this era where many farmers are desperate to make ends meet.
Additionally, by collecting and selling the dung so that it can be made into other products, farmers are also reducing the pollution caused by the release of methane into the atmosphere by allowing the dung to lay in the fields and get heated up by the sun.
Without getting too graphic here (I like to keep it family friendly), just think about it, you could, literally live in a s**thouse - and not because you’re in trouble, just because you care about the environment.