How South African students make bricks out of urine

Students at the University of Cape Town have created an eco-friendly brick. This building material is made exclusively from environmentally friendly materials: sand, bacteria and human urine are needed to create it.

These bricks are environmentally friendly, as they are not just a product of processing natural waste, they harden at room temperature after the urine is mixed with sand and special bacteria.

The result, the inventors claim, is a strong material that can be safely used in construction.

The inventors, Vuketa Muhari and Suzanne Lambert — are future civil engineers from the University of Cape Town. Their teacher, Professor Dillon Randall, helped them develop eco-friendly bricks from urine. Only organic materials are used in the process.

The idea seems crazy, but it is quite real. The whole process of creating bricks is based on one simple chemical reaction.

The sand is seeded with bacteria that produce sodium bicarbonate in contact with the urine. After that, the sand hardens and turns into a solid material from which you can make bricks.

An important advantage of the new brick is that it does not require firing, which means that during its manufacture, greenhouse gases are not released into the atmosphere. However, how exactly it is supposed to collect the main ingredient — human urine — on a scale suitable for production needs, the inventors do not report.