Ecobrique – Building With Sewage
by Leonora Oppenheim, London, UK on 06. 9.06
While flicking or rather clicking through Core 77 the other day I came across the Ecobrique. It sounded interesting, but the explanation was vague at best, ‘bricks which incorporate waste treatment plant residue in the clay matrix.’ Unfortunately the company’s website is only in french, so being the curious TreeHugger that I am, and in the hope that I could explain the Ecobrique to you, the TH reader, I asked them for an English translation. And this is what I’ve understood so far : The french company vBc 3000 has patented a process of making ceramic products from sewage sludge. Partially dried sewage sludge is mixed with clay to create bricks or expanded clay aggregates, such as lightweight concrete. The bricks can be fired in traditional kilns and the clay aggregates made in the rotary furnaces that they use in cement factories. The resulting materials are lightweight and as durable as traditional building materials.
So far so good. vBc also tell us that the cost of using sewage sludge to create ceramic building materials is competitive in comparison with the costs of other disposal methods such as incineration, composting or tipping. So the positive aspects are already clear in the productive reusage of sewage sludge and the resulting lightweight material. The next part is a bit harder to translate into layman’s terms, so I haven’t tried, they explain that, ‘During the firing, the mineralization of sewage sludge organic matter creates porosity and expansion in materials. It lightens them and it confers to them good properties of heat insulation and soundproofing. Moreover, the mineralization of sewage sludge organic matter is exothermic and reduces the energy consumption during the firing of the ceramic materials.’
The Ecobrique won the Innovation prize at the French Mayors and Local Communities trade fair in November 2004, and was nominated for the European Environmental Press prize in 2005. The first commercial production of the Ecobrique is due to start in 2007. via: Core 77 :: vBc 3000 (site only in French but will they can email a document in English on request.)
This would be a perfect fit for Vivtoria BC, since the continue to dump raw sewage into the waters off of their city.
Eleonora, you should have told me; I would have translated it for you. I'm living in France and being French. The invitation works for the next time.
Maybe I can help with the part you didn't translate into layman's terms:
During the heating process bubbles are created in the brick much like yeast does in bread. And just like in bread this reaction causes air pockets; that increases the insulation properties (R-value) of the brick while reducing the over all weight and disrupting sound waves that try to pass through.
The bit about the exothermic process can also be compared to bread making: heat causes increased activity in the yeast which adds its own heat and energy to the mix.
Hope that helps. :j
If this catches on, we'll have to change that old saying to "Built like a s**t brickhouse".
Using methane from the incoming sludge you could fire up microturbines to gernerate electricity then use the heat exhaust to make bricks and process the sludge.
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Maybe Canada could use this since I hear they can't send their sh*t (back when it was valued as fertilizer, they didn't want it to get wet on cargo ships, thus "Ship High In Transit) to Michigan anymore.
The problem with this is the incredible amount of energy needed to fire any type of brick. There are much less energy intensive things to do with sewage sludge.
Aj
I agree with Aj, sludge as a fertilizer and producer of methane is too valuable to be fired into these bricks. I do however enjoy the inventive thinking. I hope there are more people out there like this that are starting to see waste for what it really is.
they should instead find a way to produce sundried ecobriques. And i never really thought about that methane thing, i bet you could power small cities entirely on sewage. i heard this thing about the chinese raising pigs in pens below there ovens, so the poop would produce methane wich they used to cook food on the stoves above.
This sort of bricks have been made in Japan for dacades and now used estensively in paving applications that allow stormwater to be drained through rather than the usual picture of supended on the road surface, collected then form a little river and drained into sewerage! Such bricks have good porous structure (therefore better suited on foot path rather than vehicular) and also reduce overheated summer nights from radiant heat as the pores let ground moisture to evaporate through the structure thus cooling down the ground surface.
The energy needed to fire bricks is quite significant, however I think it pays off in the end since bricks make it easier to build more energy efficient buildings. People will build with bricks anyway, so you might as well be using sewage as the source material as opposed to digging up natural clay. Frankly, I think the sooner we start doing things like this, the better off we'll be.