Slashdot Mirror
The Natural Materials That Could Replace Environmentally Harmful Plastics (bbc.com)
"The BBC has an article detailing new efforts to replace plastics used in products and construction with newer, less environmentally harmful alternative materials," writes Slashdot reader dryriver. The new products mentioned in the report include: Stone Wool: To transform one of the world's most abundant resources into something with utility and sustainability takes a special kind of alchemy. Stone wool comes from natural igneous rock -- the kind that forms after lava cools -- and a steelmaking byproduct called slag; these substances are melted together and spun into fibers, a little like candyfloss.
Mycotecture: Mushrooms aren't just a flavor-packed addition to ravioli or ragu (or a sparkplug to the occasional psychedelic adventure); soon, tree-hugging fungi and forest-floor toadstools may replace materials like polystyrene, protective packaging, insulation, acoustic insulation, furniture, aquatic materials and even leather goods.
Urine Bricks: Cement, concrete's primary ingredient, accounts for about 5% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Researchers and engineers are working to develop less energy-intensive alternatives, including bricks made with leftover brewery grains, concrete modeled after ancient Roman breakwaters (Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock to form mortar, a highly stable material), and bricks made of, well, urine. As part of his thesis project, Edinburgh College of Art student Peter Trimble was working on an exhibit that was supposed to feature a module on sustainability. Almost by accident, he created "Biostone": a mixture of sand (incidentally, one of Earth's most abundant resources), nutrients, and urea -- a chemical found in human urine.
A greener particleboard: Despite what it sounds like, particleboard -- those rigid panels made of compressed and veneered wood chips and resin used in furniture and kitchen cabinetry throughout the world -- hasn't actually a place in the green-building pantheon. That's because the glue that binds particleboard's wood fibers traditionally contain formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable, strong-smelling chemical and known respiratory irritant and carcinogen. That means your faux-wood Ikea shelf is quietly "off-gassing" toxins into the air. One company, NU Green, created a material made from 100% pre-consumer recycled or recovered wood fibre called "Uniboard." Uniboard saves trees and avoids landfill, while also generating far fewer greenhouse gases than traditional particleboard, and contains no toxins. That's because Uniboard has pioneered the use of renewable fibers like corn stalks and hops, as well as no added formaldehyde (NAF) resin instead of glue.
Mycotecture: Mushrooms aren't just a flavor-packed addition to ravioli or ragu (or a sparkplug to the occasional psychedelic adventure); soon, tree-hugging fungi and forest-floor toadstools may replace materials like polystyrene, protective packaging, insulation, acoustic insulation, furniture, aquatic materials and even leather goods.
Urine Bricks: Cement, concrete's primary ingredient, accounts for about 5% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Researchers and engineers are working to develop less energy-intensive alternatives, including bricks made with leftover brewery grains, concrete modeled after ancient Roman breakwaters (Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock to form mortar, a highly stable material), and bricks made of, well, urine. As part of his thesis project, Edinburgh College of Art student Peter Trimble was working on an exhibit that was supposed to feature a module on sustainability. Almost by accident, he created "Biostone": a mixture of sand (incidentally, one of Earth's most abundant resources), nutrients, and urea -- a chemical found in human urine.
A greener particleboard: Despite what it sounds like, particleboard -- those rigid panels made of compressed and veneered wood chips and resin used in furniture and kitchen cabinetry throughout the world -- hasn't actually a place in the green-building pantheon. That's because the glue that binds particleboard's wood fibers traditionally contain formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable, strong-smelling chemical and known respiratory irritant and carcinogen. That means your faux-wood Ikea shelf is quietly "off-gassing" toxins into the air. One company, NU Green, created a material made from 100% pre-consumer recycled or recovered wood fibre called "Uniboard." Uniboard saves trees and avoids landfill, while also generating far fewer greenhouse gases than traditional particleboard, and contains no toxins. That's because Uniboard has pioneered the use of renewable fibers like corn stalks and hops, as well as no added formaldehyde (NAF) resin instead of glue.
Are they trying to find the stupidest things to put on here? Half of the list also isn't for plastic.
The primary problem in building materials is cost. I can buy "natural fiber" insulation for 3x the price of the pink stuff. The $2000 difference is significant. The other issue is that these mostly shift the "bad stuff" somewhere else - whether it has to be replaced sooner or your production and transportation process is dirtier and more energy demanding.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If you're ok with very fine grained sand like what's in the Sahara, then yes, there's plenty of that. But the kind of sand needed for construction is in short supply.
Look up "sand mafia" if you don't believe me.
Which is the best place to try to help the environment. The production of:
A) Stuff that is used briefly and then the average family throws away thousands of pounds of it, such as packaging.
B) Stuff that is made one time and used for 50 years.
The average person uses far more consumer packaging and other consumer goods in their lifetime than building materials. On balance, it the production of the building materials for my house just don't make any significant difference. I bought the walls once, I buy beverages and food every day. We use electricity every day. The stuff we buy over and over and over again are going to have far more impact.
The exception, perhaps, is concrete only regarding CO2. That's a significant number, if you focus just on CO2 as opposed to environmental concerns generally. It would be cool to have a process for producing a concrete-like product which sequesters carbon as part of the material, and that's not at all far-fetched.
Was made more or less the same way we make the lime in cement today... They heated sea shells (calcium carbonate). We heat lime stone (calcium carbonate). Both processes release CO2 (the carbonate). They mixed their cement, in some cases, with a very particular type of volcanic material to make a very strong form of cement that sets under water and continues to harden. We have something similar today, now that the chemistry of that volcanic material is understood.
Cement, combined with "aggregate" (stone, sand etc) is called concrete.
The article, in this regard, is dumb.
Myco packaging is a very good replacement for styrofoam, in that it can be grown and composted. There are other biofilm materials, both vegetable fiber (for "plastic" wraps) and algae-based (for food wrapping).
Urine bricks, combined with seashells (which literally absorb carbon from the air in water (yes, there is air there, what do you think fish breathe)), have a bonus or removing toxics from the environment while carbon storing.
CLT methods for building replace emission-creating materials and glues with carbon-storing materials and glues. Again, there are some glues that are foresty, mycofarming, and algal based.
Most of the cost is the artificial subsidy for plastic and fossil fuel pollution built into the system, where we only calculate the Goods and not the Bads in GDP. Classical Capitalism, as done by Adam Smith, who created it, calculates both Goods and Bads in all levels of production and consumption and cleanup.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I want to say one word to you... just one word. Are you listening?
Mycotecture.
#DeleteChrome
All abundant and/or renewable, all cheap, all recyclable and/or safely disposable. ... Duh?
Oh, so one of the ingredients of the urine bricks is "nutrients"?
Also sand might be very abundant in total, but sand appropriate for building with is much less abundant - river and beach sand work and there have been articles on Slashdot in the past about sand piracy and blackmarket sand. Desert sand, of which there is a huge abundance, is not appropriate, because it's too small and light.
Rather than some 'urine bricks', I'd be more interested if someone had found a way to make desert sand useful in construction.
the new plastic
on this planet. There are many options.
The average house is also made of pine. What's the environmental impact of growing 100 pound pine tree vs 100 pounds of styrofoam?
Of course the concrete foundation is a large percentage of the weight, and as I mentioned concrete is the one building material that really does matter.
The disturbing thing is reading some of the commentary in response to this post. I am surprised how many germophobes and pissophobes read /. To clarify, the original article does not report about people peeing their infected urine into a bucket of sand to make funkodelic plaster to spackle your walls. Although, I suppose that some of the respondents, seemingly "under the influence" and having had too much beer tonight might find a bucket of sand a relief.
Quoting the original article: “Biostone: a mixture of sand (incidentally, one of Earth’s most abundant resources), nutrients, and urea – a chemical found in human urine. Pumping bacterial solution into a sand-filled mould, Trimble devised hundreds of experiments over the course of a year until he tweaked the recipe. The microbes eventually metabolised the mixture of sand, urea, and calcium chloride, creating a glue that strongly bound the sand molecules together."
The process uses urea, "a chemical found in urine". Urea is also found in the primordial chemistry of the universe. In humans, urea equals nitrogen. Recall that proteins are chains of amino acids (also primordial chemistry). They have a carboxyl -COOH (the acid) and an amine -NH2 (the amino-) terminus where the end to end polymerization takes place. When proteins degrade, urea (CH4N2O) is the final catabolic product of proteins, which being water soluble is eliminated in the urine. Remember that urine is just a clean ultrafiltrate of the blood, sieved by the kidney, from which unwanted metabolic waste is not resorbed. Urine is stored in the bladder until a socially appropriate opportunity, and in healthy people, it is sterile.
Recall that organic chemistry became a reality of science and industry when urea was synthesized in 1828 by Friedrich Wöhler. Being a carbonyl of two amides, it a useful backbone reagent for making other useful organic compounds. It is used liberally in many medicinal and cosmetic products and in many industrial processes. The majority is used for fertilizer. Those large industrial quantities are manufactured from ammonia and carbon dioxide at large chemical plants, not in a Slurm-like dungeon where drunken frat boys are getting themselves wet. If Biostone ever becomes a product, fret not that you will be living in a house of pee. Who was dumb enough to think that in the first place?
On the subject of "germs", remember, they are on you body by the trillions. They are necessary for our own health and the functionings of the entire biosphere. They are also abundant in industrial processes. The list includes mining and metal extraction, decomposition of oil, production of many drugs, production of many basic organic solvents and workhorse chemicals. They also make your food, such as yogurt and cheese. Imagine that, when you eat yogurt, you are simply eating a giant bacteria culture, as if your Yoplait container was just a fancy shaped Petri dish.
Microbial processes are also important in geology, having much to do with the deposition of stable mineral varnishes and caliches from water soluble salts, i.e, the kind of natural materials that are useful as mortars and cements. Read the article. That is what this study did. It used urea, calcium chloride, and sand to make an accretion that had adhesion and structural strength. The article mentions that ammonia outgassed from the process, meaning the process reverses the production of urea, so even if some nitrogen persists in the caliche, the pissophobes amongst us need not fear to live among the bricks.
After almost two centuries of industrialization, synthetic chemistry, and carbonization trashing the planet we live on, it should be inspiring that there are people making earnest efforts to find better solutions. Think of that next time you smear some skin moisturizer or sun block on your body - read the ingrediant list - urea. Or, if you prefer, take a golden shower.
How did they know WTC7 was going to collapse before it actually did? You can actually see it in the background as the anchor announces the breaking "news".
Isn't asbestos a kind of "stone wool"? They should at least test this stuff for biological safety.
Whats wrong with hemp ?
Was used at the turn of the last century ?
It was only a few stinking rich capitalist pigs that ruined the whole hemp party, for their own inferior products.
Bring it back !!!
From what little I know, plastic is by product of refining gasoline. As long as we consume gasoline at current rates, we are going to end up with megatons of plastic. If we find alternatives to plastic, it will only push the cost of plastic lower but it is not going away.
How to solve the world’s plastics problem: Bring back the milk man https://www.cnn.com/interactiv...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
If it's using lime, it's being made from limestone. The Romans did it (eg. the Roman lime works at Iversheim) and so do we.
Lime is very chemically active and, in the presence of CO2 (e.g. from the air), readily yielding calcium carbonate---even at room temperature.
Just another lame item in the article. Replace the lime and the energy demand and then someone would really have something worthwhile to write about.
> bricks made of, well, urine
I've heard of "shitting bricks" before, but this is a first.
Sounds painful. Especially the corners.
Has the long term effect of breathing stone fiber dust been studied?
Does the manufacture of Urea, made from natural gas, emit less carbon than the calcination of Portland cement?
Seconded. Amazon should use hemp for packaging.