Could a Mix of Sand and Pee Be a Super-Green Replacement for Concrete?

Peter Trimble's Dupe is a mini manufacturing unit that creates a sandstone-like material. Peter Trimble

Our built world is full of dirty secrets. So many of the things we imagine to have little impact on our environment turn out to be remarkably unsustainable. Concrete, bricks, asphalt—we encounter these materials daily without ever really giving much thought to the fact that they’re actually pumping huge amounts of CO2 into our air due to their energy-intensive creation processes.

But alternatives to concrete and brick construction aren’t super common. Mainly because concrete and bricks have engineered over centuries to be very good at their jobs. Increasingly, though, designers and scientists are experimenting with new materials that are structurally similar to concrete while being a helluva lot greener.

Peter Trimble is one of them. For his thesis project, Dupe, the graduate of the University of Edinburgh, investigated if it was possible to grow our building material instead of using intensive heat. “I thought, Is there an equivalent material that’s more environmentally friendly but structurally comparable out there?” he recalls. Turns out there is. All you need is some sand, bacteria (Sporosarcina pasteurii a.k.a. bacillus pasteurii), (A) calcium chloride, (B) nutrient broth, (C) acid,  and a decent amount of (D) urea and alkali (E) to make it happen.

Trimble’s idea isn’t an entirely new. A team of synthetic biologists from Stanford and Brown are looking into if this material could be used to build structures on Mars, and a couple years ago designer Ginger Krieg Dosier started BioMason, a company that creates bricks made from the very material Trimble used in his project in order to uproot the construction industry.

Admittedly, Trimble’s end goal was a little more modest. For his final project, he created a squat stool that is capable of holding all of his 200 pounds, but even this simple outcome is a testament to the material’s potential uses. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind Trimble is not a scientist. “I’m trained as a product designer,” he says. “So there was a massive massive learning curve.”

He began reading scientific papers, consulting with geo-engineers and working out the kinks of his recipe in the lab, using beakers and science equipment, “That was all well and good but for a product design product I need to make it look like it could actually be realized.”

A team of synthetic biologists from Stanford and Brown are looking into if this material could be used to build structures on Mars.

Trimble ended up designing a mini manufacturing unit, which looks uncannily like an at-home beer brewery kit. There’s a stainless steel container, a mixer from a food blender and a pump from a coffee machine. Using this setup, the sand is poured into the stool’s mold before the bacteria is added. This bacteria and sand mixture sits overnight to ensure the liquid gets deep in-between sand particles. The next day, Trimble adds the urea and calcium chloride solution. When it comes into contact with the bacteria, a bond is formed, creating a cement-like material.

The sandstone has some drawbacks. Without reinforcement, its around two-thirds as strong as cement. And Trimble says it would need to be developed to better protect against erosion and water damage.

But on to the really important thing: We know you’re wondering, and no, Trimble didn’t actually use urine to build his stool— though he totally could have. “I didn’t particularly fancy setting a bin in my bathroom and getting my flatmates to fill it up with urine, so we skipped that one,” he laughs. “Technically it’s possible, but you would need like 100 liters or something, and that’s a lot of wee.”

ORIGINAL: Wired

By Liz Stinson
01.13.14

Liz is a Brooklyn-based reporter for Wired Design. She likes talking to people about technology, innovation and pretty things.

Read more by Liz Stinson
Follow @lizstins on Twitter.

These Machines Made Out Of Molecules Could Be A Manufacturing Revolution

ORIGINAL: FastCoExist

MICHAEL J. COREN

IMAGE: Cells via Shutterstock

Imagine that instead of making drugs in a lab, we had atomic-sized machines that could do it for us. Those tiny machines are on their way.

Nature is a veritable machine shop. In the cells and structures of every living organism lie motors, pumps, assembly lines, tiny vehicles, and other far more sophisticated versions of the machinery we have created for ourselves to do work.

Now we’re mimicking nature’s 4 billion years of evolution to manufacture on the scale of atoms. Chemistry typically takes a brute force approach to make molecules: mix and isolate compounds, add catalysts and chemicals, then wait until the right chemicals have formed. 

It’s difficult and inefficient compared to the elegant molecular machines that biology has designed to manufacture its exotic compounds for life. Individual molecules are being designed to serve as primitive nano-machines.

Now, scientists are taking the cue. Individual molecules are being designed to serve as primitive nano-machines whose shape and properties allow them to venture out into a chemical solution, or living cells, and repeatedly perform tasks. Eventually, it is hoped, these new molecules will lead to more efficient and cost-effective manufacturing systems at the atomic level.

One of the latest breakthroughs, published this month in the journal Nature is a nanorobot that grabs six amino acids, similar to how robotic arms manipulate parts in car factories, and reassembles these in a sequence known as a peptide. The team, drawn from the universities of Manchester and Edinburgh in the U.K., relied on a structure similar to a molecular axle with a ring threaded on it--known as a rotaxane--to let a molecular machine travel along the axle, grab each amino acid and then chain them together.

The machine, says David Leigh of the University of Manchester and co-author of the study, is a very primitive version of the ribosome, the protein manufacturing center of the cell, and is the first step to start making a machine that can manufacture complex custom molecules such as the drug penicillin. But for now, it is barely functional compared to the speed and sophistication of its biological inspiration. Leigh’s team needed 12 hours and a billion squared molecular machines (that’s 1 with 18 zeros) to make just a few milligrams of peptide. Compared to the ribosome, the artificial machines take hours instead of seconds, can only make simple proteins, and destroy the underlying molecule in the process.

Yet scientists are making rapid progress. In the last few years, synthetic molecular machines are starting to adapt mechanical principles from rotors, gyroscopes, scissors, wheelbarrows, and cars, as well as cribbing off the blueprint proved by nature by using the principles of biochemistry and physics.

MICHAEL J. COREN

Michael Coren covers science, economics and the environment. He is the cofounder of the multimedia production studio + newsroom MajorPlanet Studios.