21st Century Green Tech

1. Sustainable Brick Made from Sand, Bacteria and Pee
2. Super-Insulator Aerogel Could Also Clean Up Oil Spills

Sustainable Brick Made from Sand, Bacteria and Pee

2010-05-12 15:23

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better-brick
It seems like pee, or more specifically urea, is becoming quite the sustainable ingredient. Beyond being tapped as a good source of hydrogen, it's powering batteries and is now being used to make sustainable bricks.

Architect Ginger Krieg Dosier has designed a way of "growing" bricks by combining sand, bacteria, calcium chloride and urea, all easy-to-come-by materials. Traditional brick-making is very energy-intensive, producing more pollution than global air travel each year. It's also consumes a lot of resources: 400 trees are burned to make 25,000 bricks.

These Better Bricks are created through a chain of chemical reactions known as microbial-induced calcite precipitation. Once all the ingredients are combined, the bacteria serves as a glue that binds the sand together, creating a brick that is as tough as a fired-clay brick or even marble and requires no baking to achieve that strength.

If Better Bricks replaced all traditionally-fired bricks, 800 million tons of CO2 emissions would be eliminated each year.

via Inhabitat

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Super-Insulator Aerogel Could Also Clean Up Oil Spills

2010-05-12 14:50

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aerogel
Aerogel, the amazing material that is 37 times better than fiberglass as insulation, could also be the perfect tool for cleaning up oil spills. The downside is that Aerogel isn't ready for the large-scale production necessary to help with the current oil disaster.

The material is incredibly low density - it's mostly air - so it has the capacity to absorb a lot of oil. The maker of Aerogel, AeroClay, is beginning testing on an Aerogel sponge that could be made to soak up either water or oil. By modifying the polymers that keep the material from collapsing, scientists can program the sponge to absorb different liquids or particles. Aerogel has been used by NASA in the past to capture comet dust.

In the case of an oil spill, the sponge could be used like a dish sponge to clean oil off birds or rocks, or, even better, be deployed to keep oil from ever reaching the shore.

Although we hope that a major oil spill like the one in the Gulf of Mexico never happens again, it's good to know that technology is being developed to make us better prepared if it does.

via Treehugger