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<body>On Mon, 30 Jun 2014 19:14:42 -0400, sanjay jain <sanjayjainuk@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:<br><br><blockquote style="margin: 0 0 0.80ex; border-left: #0000FF 2px solid; padding-left: 1ex"><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:12pt"><div><span>I don't understand the biodegradability claim. Not sure how long it would last as foundations, maybe better suited for walls.</span></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div><big>Except for those who fell for the claims made by the purveyors of those bass-ackwards ICF </big><big>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 .</big></div><div><big><br></big></div><div><big>This UK student's material reminds me very much of the mycelium-based-binder building blocks to which Sacie posted </big><big>a link recently (within the past year ?) , the story being about an Murrican professor's company that was in the process</big> <big>of bringing her product to market.</big><big><br></big></div><div><big><br></big></div><div><big>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. </big></div><div><big><br></big></div><div><big>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)</big></div><div><big><br></big></div><div><big>The possible environmental impacts of ammonia are not trivial, as bad or worse than that due to the production of Portland cement for concrete.</big></div><div><big><br></big></div><div><big>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. </big></div><div><big>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.<br></big></div><big><br></big><br><div id="M2Signature"><div>-- </div><div>=== * ===<br>Rob Tom . . . T60BOM<br>Kanata, Ontario, Canada<br><br>A r c h i L o g i c at Y a h o o dot C A<br>(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit "reply")</div></div></body></html>