New Process Uses Genetically Modified Yeast to Turn Carbon Dioxide Emissions Into Bricks for Construction

In theory this should work wonderfully. I hope they are successful in commercializing the process! That would be wonderful if it could be scaled as needed to handle all the worlds CO2 production!

I can see Al Gore finding a way to tax people for having to many bricks now..call it global bricking...its going to make the oceans rise by 15ft if you put them in the water. lol

This is brilliant! Economically speaking, it's almost like brickmaking in reverse while still producing bricks. Now the only question is the structural integrity of these bricks. If they're strong enough for buildings, great. If they're only strong enough for pathways and landscaping, that's still great. If it crumbles to dust when you bump it with your elbow...

Of course someone's going to have to haul all these bricks around... in trucks... now if they could only create a brick-powered engine, that would be something.

lol

i like it alot but i would wonder about weather exposior to water could cause an acidic reaction or if they would just dissolve

Can the growth pattern be controlled? Can the minerals be printed in a geometric pattern between two pieces of thick paper or carbon fiber to create a composite material? Can it be used to fuse to and direct the direction of carbon fibers? Maybe it can be used to create Cheep walls, car panels, or even air craft wings and fuselage. I think there could be allot more potential there.

eh.. these GM yeast make carbonates. I imagine there will be more GM yeasT (or another organism) that will, instead of affixing mineral ions, assemble the C, O, and H's (maybe more elements, but this is what i'm working with) into hydrocarbons such as octane [C8H18], and producing O2 as a byproduct. (and making ethanol [CH3CH2OH] too.) ooh and we can eventually integrate them into 3d printers that make giant seashell cars and boats, that burn this fuel in their seashell engines, with seashell pistons and the catalytic convertors will involve some GM microorganisms which scrub the air clean producing more fuel and hull repair! lol. then we can all live in a seashell submarine having our waste recycled into skittles, taste the rainbow! of course we would probably have better luck with nanites, so we don't all suffer from incurable genetically modified super yeast infections that encase us in crusty seashell, leaching minerals from our bodies and eventually fossilizing us all. hmmmmmmm reminds me of the eleventh hour episode 'electro' except with seashells

you could make plenty of stuff with different metals + the carbonate, but the most awesome endeavor would be to take silicon, the second most abundant element in the earth's crust, and i'm not sure if the yeast could handle this, but you take your Si + CO3, make Silicon Carbide SiC and replenish the ozone layer/make oxygen. more oxygen to help our brains function, and Silicon Carbide for its properties as a semiconductor, abrasive, etc. it's got plenty of uses and i think it would be a leap forward for the field of nanotechnology, toward the development of 'nanites'
seriously, lots of uses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_carbide
this captcha is tough. all because i included a url.

Wonderful Jedi; love it. We won't need to burry our hero’s we can carbonize them in a heroic poses.

Adding ceramics to plastic gives it heat resistant properties creating thermoplastics. I noticed that thermoplastics have a molding limit that can be broken to add more ceramics, by assisting the molding process with microwaves. We could create more ceramic than plastic but its still molded. The proof for this is that microwaves are used to weld thermoplastic containers. Affordable molded ceramics. Even complex internal structures can be made like Lego blocks and then molded into shape keeping super structure properties through the molding process. Imagine affordable 32 cylinder engines moving commuters at two hundred miles per hour.

Sequestering CO2 from the air, producing O2 and building material. Don't we already have this? I think it is called "a tree."

I think the "dissolvability" question is a fair one, as well as the realization that these bricks will burn (the non-flamable nature of normal bricks has always been one of their selling points).

Will these bricks be sufficiently porous that when shattered, they can be incorporated into the soil like biochar?

Because a cheap brick walkway that I can bust up in twenty years when it looks like crap and till into the garden would be great (for me, and likely only me).

@ Oaksparr77777

Carbonate is used in the production of portland cement which is the most widely used cement in the world. the ability to create that from thin air is huge. Also they use it in iron smelting... now I know it would just be releasing it into the atmosphere when you heated it but imagine the smelting plants could harvest their CO2 emissions turn it into carbonate and then repeat the process... it would change iron and steel production forever and make it a very clean process.

I thought mollusk shell formation slowed with the addition of carbon dioxide. Weird.

Anyway, if this new "brick" is really the same material, I don't think we'll need to worry about it dissolving or burning.

Okay, all kinds of comments and no one noticed that they said that the process will involve *no chemicals*.

ROFLMAO

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