Biomason Growing Concrete Bricks Using Microbes

Brief 

North Carolina-based firm Biomason is working on a way to grow concrete bricks from microbes. The bricks are made by mixing trillions of living microbes with crushed rock and simple powders containing nitrogen and carbon to produce the slurry used to make the bricks.

Insight

Unless you are a particular kind of architecture nerd, you probably never think about concrete. The ancient building material is dull, heavy, and gray — not exactly inspiring. It forms the world’s largest dams, ugliest highways, and the underside of most homes. But concrete is worth paying attention to because of how quickly it is destroying the planet.

After water, concrete is the most used material on Earth. Hulking masses of the stuff can be found nearly everywhere that people live. And as billions break free from the shackles of poverty, concrete demand is now higher than ever before. Between 2011 and 2013, China poured more new concrete than the United States did in the whole prior century.

Making this much concrete is a disaster for the planet. To manufacture it, billions of tons of limestone are burned inside gigantic coal-powered furnaces, unleashing truly unbelievable flows of carbon dioxide. In just one step of the nightmare process, we emit by weight about as much carbon pollution as we gain in useful material. Today’s concrete industry is one of the world’s worst climate offenses.

Ginger Krieg Dosier, who heads the North Carolina company Biomason, is on a mission to change that.For the past ten years, Biomason has developed ways of growing concrete bricks using microbes. Their existing products, which meet or exceed the material properties of traditional concrete bricks, require zero carbon emissions to produce and come in several colors.

“Our goal is to cut 25 percent of the concrete industries’ carbon emissions by 2030,” Krieg Dosier tells me. “I think that solving [the problem] with biology is the most beautiful way to fix this,” she says.