Sustainable engineers Kenoteq are reinventing the brick
cnn.com
cnn.com
I work in the masonry trade, all of the materials we use are from brick yards and quarries that are local (~75-100mi radius) for the simple fact that transporting large numbers of pallets of brick over long distances is a logistical nightmare. Storing them can also prove to be a problem, so much so that we literally throw away thousands of bricks we have left over from jobs every year. It’s rare that two customers would use the same bricks and we end up keeping the extras until we know we’re not getting called back in to do additional work.
They’re right that reclaiming bricks as being labor intensive work. The real holy grail of this industry would be figuring out how to reclaim the trillions of bricks already in circulation without needing human intervention. There is often huge demand for antique bricks because a lot of the unique clay deposits used to create the bricks end up being totally depleted. Milwaukee, WI is famous for their Cream City bricks that were produced in the mid and late 19th century but once the unique clay beds used to create these bricks were gone, so were new Cream Cities. You can see these in just about every city’s downtown in Wisconsin. I’ve spent many hours reclaiming these bricks from old houses and factories because for one, they look incredible, and two, they’re worth about a dollar a piece once they’re ready to be laid again (Pretty good money if you’re good with a brick hammer). If there was a way you could dump a house worth of old bricks into one end of a black box and spit out reusable brick from the other end, you’d basically be printing money. Mortar is not easily removed from brick without damaging the brick. That’s kind of the whole point of the mortar being used as a binder in the first place.
For anyone interested, Cream City bricks has a Wikipedia page[0] with pictures of buildings built with them.
I thought it was pretty silly to compare this product to bricks on it's cost/strength/waste. People aren't choosing brick for these factors anyway. People choose brick mainly for the aesthetic.
Even brick masonry now is split-face and limited to at-grade elevations.
Speaking of reinventing, I'm still waiting on Elon Musk's eco-bricks [1] and whenever foamed metals [2] become popular.
[1] - https://interestingengineering.com/boring-companys-eco-brick...
It probably comes down to tradition. In the old parts of any city, all of the 100 year-old houses have brick exteriors, as well as most of the houses built since then.
Example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/615000-new-...
Of course, there are even better alternatives, like building your home out of solar sequestered carbon solids, i.e. wood.
This.
Not only that, but in concrete alone there are a myriad of concrete types and tech improvements throughout the years.
The whole article is founded in a false premise. It's as if naive salespeople were expecting no one in the construction industty would have any idea of what a brick is and how construction technology has been changing throughout the years.
Assuming also that the externalities of the existing brick manufacturing industry are not costed into the price of a standard brick. Other sources suggest that the k-briq is also more insulative than a regular brick, which should impact the cost calculations as well.
I mean it is a neat concept but unfortunately efficiency often selects the "boring" option.
It also means getting more CEBs to affect repairs can be sourced locally, and does not require a functioning global supply chain. (Assuming you can keep the CEB machine in good repair; but that is why it is open-sourced).
I think there are some heat retaining properties that CEB have that conventional bricks don't have. Combined with a hollow-core, or insulated core wall construction, the end results are housing that are more efficient with heating and cooling.
When combined with permaculture design, the excavation can be done to build swales for efficient rain water harvesting.
So yeah, if we only look at the cost from just the perspective of sourcing conventional bricks, maybe it won't compete. From the perspective of whole system design and resilient systems, I think CEB offers something better.
I notice they don't mention what the binder is, and I see it labeled as a "secret binder" in another article.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10669205B2/en?oq=US10669...
I think this is the patent, but they don't mention a "binder" per se. There are several claims specifically relating to the exclusion of "tar" which seems interesting. I think someone better versed in reading patents than I am might be able to make more sense of that. Tar just doesn't seem like their style. Maybe there are already claims on that or they are well known. But "organic matter", "tar", "cement" or "fly ash" still seem like possibilities.
The patent also mentions "additive" (e.g. pigment / recycled toner) as improving the strength of the resulting bricks and reducing moisture uptake. It can be added in surprising amounts (5-20%). That doesn't seem very scalable though.
Or, of course, they could have come up with something else in the meantime. Distinctly possible.