[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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