[Greenbuilding] Article: Would you live in a house made of sand and bacteria?
RT
ArchiLogic at yahoo.ca
Thu Jul 3 17:20:21 CDT 2014
On Mon, 30 Jun 2014 19:14:42 -0400, sanjay jain <sanjayjainuk at yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
> I don't understand the biodegradability claim. Not sure how long it
> would last as foundations, maybe better suited for >walls.
Except for those who fell for the claims made by the purveyors of those
bass-ackwards ICF systems, here on this side of the pond, very few people
make the walls of their low-rise/non-multiple unit homes out of concrete,
so I'm guessing that's what the "bio-degradabilty claim" is about -- the
use of concrete in LR/non-MURBs is primarily in below/at-grade
applications .
This UK student's material reminds me very much of the
mycelium-based-binder building blocks to which Sacie posted a link
recently (within the past year ?) , the story being about an Murrican
professor's company that was in the process of bringing her product to
market.
IIRC, it too utilised urea to encourage the microbes to do their stuff and
I seem to recall thinking that that was one of the issues that bothered me
at the time.
ie Unless one is situated near a large cluster of fratboys whose constant
kegger parties can provide a perpetual stream of urine, it's likely that
the required urea would be sourced from some process where large amounts
of ammonia is a by-product. Perhaps that explains why it is a university
student and a university professor who stumbled upon these
construction-oriented mycelium ? (ie fratboy proximity)
The possible environmental impacts of ammonia are not trivial, as bad or
worse than that due to the production of Portland cement for concrete.
PS: This message is being sent from a T60 laptop that is still running Win
XP Pro, many months after the supposed End of the XP World.
I did have it running as a dual-boot system with Ubuntu for awhile but the
Ubuntu OS crapped-out after a while so I deleted the Ubuntu partition and
it seems quite content to keep plugging along on the XP OS. True, I don't
use this laptop all that often but every time I've fired it up, it's done
whatever has been required of it. It appears that all the fuss about MS
dropping support of Win XP was as over-hyped as the Y2K fuss.
--
=== * ===
Rob Tom . . . T60BOM
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
A r c h i L o g i c at Y a h o o dot C A
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit "reply")
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