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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Revolutionary 'green' types of bricks and construction materials could be made from recycled PVC, waste plant fibers or sand with the help of a remarkable new kind of rubber polymer discovered by Australian scientists.
The rubber polymer, itself made from sulfur and canola oil, can be compressed and heated with fillers to create construction materials of the future, says a new paper unveiling a promising new technique just published in Chemistry—A European Journal.
"This method could produce materials that may one day replace non-recyclable construction materials, bricks and even concrete replacement," says organic chemistry researcher Flinders University Associate Professor Justin Chalker.
[...] "This new recycling method and new composites are an important step forward in making sustainable construction materials, and the rubber material can be repeatedly ground up and recycled," says lead author Flinders Ph.D. Nic Lundquist. "The rubber particles also can be first used to purify water and then repurposed into a rubber mat or tubing."
"This is also important because there are currently few methods to recycle PVC or carbon fiber," he says, with collaborators from Flinders, Deakin University and University of WA.
[...] The new manufacturing and recycling technique, called reactive compression molding, applies to rubber material that can be compressed and stretched, but one that doesn't melt. The unique chemical structure of the sulfur backbone in the novel rubber allows for multiple pieces of the rubber to bond together.
More information: Nicholas Lundquist et al. Reactive compression molding post‐inverse vulcanization: A method to assemble, recycle, and repurpose sulfur polymers and composites, Chemistry – A European Journal (2020). DOI: 10.1002/chem.202001841
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @06:10PM (4 children)
There's no way some rubber/plastic brick is going to last as long as a ceramic brick. It will degrade, losing strength, appearance, or chemicals to the environment. And since it doesn't last as long, it will have to be replaced (recycled) sooner with all the losses and inefficiency that goes with that. Bricks can last 150 years or more and they are chemically inert, thus harmless to the environment when in use and when disposed of.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday May 26 2020, @06:19PM (3 children)
Plastic lasts basically forever, in fact that's one of the big problems with it. Unless exposed sunlight, which causes it to break up (though sadly not break down) - so paint your walls.
Doesn't really matter how long your bricks theoretically last when the building is probably torn down much sooner. Then the question becomes, how re-usable are your bricks? And the answer is typically "not very" - the mortar typically binds to them too strongly to turn them back into useful bricks, so you get rubble. And concrete is hardly chemically inert.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 26 2020, @06:52PM
Not to mention that plastic is something that we've gotten rather good at tuning. One of the big headaches with recycling plastics is that there's so many of them and they don't all play well together when recycled. Depending upon the mixture of plastics you can get varying degrees of rigidity and density.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 27 2020, @02:21PM (1 child)
If it's one thing bricks are not exposed to, it's sunlight. :-) Which works great if you live in Seattle.
TFS says it's converting those materials into a rubber polymer. Rubber responds pretty dynamically to heat. Does that work in a brick form? Dynamic expansion and contraction would seem to work against the bonding agent between the bricks and allow the elements to invade. It's already a problem with regular brick (which keeps tuckpointers busy).
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday May 28 2020, @01:08AM
There's this thing called paint, perhaps you've heard of it?