While a thin carbon fiber helmet and a bulkier natural fiber helmet may have the same level of safety, one will end up in a landfill, while the other could decompose naturally.
Mogas-Soldevila said it’s inevitable that the future of buildings will be made from refurbished waste products in part because of what’s known as “end of life.”
“The end of life is very problematic,” she said. “We cannot separate concrete from rebar at the end of life. Here our rebar is fiber. And that’s why we can get bending. That’s how we can make a beam out of shrimp and straw. Because we have a straw that’s very good at bending and we have shrimp shells that are very good at binding the straw to itself. So now we have a bending compressive material, which is what concrete and rebar does.”
Right now, experiments like these are in the very early stages. Manufacturers will only invest in these types of biodegradable materials if they have to pay for the disposal of their own waste, said Michael Grant, director of communications at Penn’s Weitzman School of Design.
“At some point, developers will be held accountable for life cycles, for [their] waste,” Grant said. “But until there is financial liability for waste, there will never be enough incentive to invest sufficiently in biomaterials.”
Grant said he’s confident that day will come.
“It will happen as landfills fill and cities can no longer afford to burn waste,” he said.
The question is: Can these products be scaled up?
Mears said she sees a future in agricultural waste, things like straw, because it’s so prevalent.
“That’s where some of this really interesting building product development is happening, using that kind of material,” Mears said. “You can start to see scale there and adoption in the use of products that are made from those kinds of what we might have called waste products, but now are resources.”
Mears says right now, there are many academic labs working on similar products, but they are also in initial phases.
“I think some places are starting to think about how they scale up, even if it’s at a residential kind of scale, which is very small scale, but that is the hope,” she said.
“That future is coming,” Mogas-Soldevila said. “We already have straw bale housing that has been brought into the modern era. We are all looking at Danish algae roofs and how we can modernize them. So, it’s coming.”
Mogas-Soldevila said there’s no need to invent something new to solve many of our climate and environmental problems because the answers lie all around us in nature. She is focused on looking to our food waste to build the future.
