It’s Alive! New Organic Bricks Reproduce, Could Replace Concrete

A new “living concrete” has been developed at the University of Colorado in Boulder, USA, paving the way for a sustainable low-carbon alternative to the traditional water, sand and cement mix.

The new bricks are made with photosynthetic bacteria and gelatin, and can even regenerate when mixed with additional nutrients, sand and warm water. In just a week, scientists saw one brick transform into two. After further testing, they were eventually able to create eight bricks from the original!

Wil Srubar, structural engineer and co-author of the study published in the journal Matter, is hopeful the team can create a version of the bricks fully resistant to dehydration in the near future. “We’re not going to be trucking bags of cement all the way to Mars,” he says in a statement. “I really do think that we’ll be bringing biology with us once we go.”

Additionally, the living bacteria can bind a variety of materials together, as Srubar explains to the New York Times: “We’re not pigeonholed into using some particular kind of sand. We could use waste materials like ground glass or recycled concrete.”