Weirdest green building materials

By now, proponents of green construction techniques are more than familiar with things like denim insulation, locally sourced building materials and recycled plastic lumber. So we here at Greenbang thought we’d explore some of the less conventional green building materials being experimented with in various corners of the globe:

Bacteria-laced sand

Yes, that’s right: bacteria-laced sand. Magnus Larsson, a student at the Architectural Association in London, last fall won first prize in the Holcim Foundation’s Awards for Sustainable Construction with his proposed process for using bacillus pasteurii to turn sand into artificial sandstone.

Bullet-proof bricks

Earlier this year, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva announced plans to build a million homes for the poor with cement blocks produced by the UK firm Ultra Green. The blocks not only provide good thermal and acoustic insulation, but are designed to be bullet-proof.

Light-transmitting concrete

Invented by Hungarian architect Áron Losonczi in 2001, Litracon™ is a building material that combines optical fibres with fine concrete to produce see-through solid blocks. While concrete alone is usually not very green, a light-transmitting version could conceivably be used to reduce indoor lighting costs while eliminating window-based heat loss.

Paper

While we all realise paper’s light and cheap, it’s hard to imagine it also being weather- and earthquake-proof. But German designer Gerd Niemoeller has devised a way to combine recycled paper materials with cellulose to produce a building material that’s ideal for emergency shelters, refugee housing and homes for the poor.

Inflatable diamonds

The Yorkshire Diamond Pavilion, designed by Various Architects, is a lightweight structure made of inflatable tubes. Based on the atomic structure of diamonds, the pavilion is also composed of recyclable materials and can generate its own energy.

Plastic bottles

Not bricks or lumber of recycled plastic, but actual bottles themselves: a full 13,500 of them. That’s how many it took for Serbian math professor Tomislav Radovanovic to build a 60-square-metre house of plastic over the course of five years.