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EU pro­ject: Build­ing houses with bacteria

10.03.2015
It starts with a com­mon type of soil bac­teri­um being revital­ised in a mix­ture of urea and nutri­ents at a con­stant tem­per­at­ure, of around 30 degrees Celsi­us. Piero Tiano, a bio­lo­gist with the Itali­an Insti­tute for the Con­ser­va­tion and Pre­ser­va­tion of Cul­tur­al Her­it­age told euronews how it works: ​“Inside this mix, bac­teria starts to devel­op; they basic­ally grow in num­ber. The bac­teria has to reach a cer­tain quant­ity in order to make cement. After around three hours of fer­ment­a­tion, our mix is ready for use”. The sci­ent­ists then add the revital­ised bac­teria to a mix of sand, indus­tri­al cement waste and the ash of rice husks. Cement man­u­fac­tur­ing accounts for some five per­cent of glob­al car­bon emis­sions, research­ers say. This pro­ject aims to prove that green­er, eco­lo­gic­ally friendly cement is pos­sible. ​“Our raw mater­i­als are basic­ally all waste. So we don’t have added costs,” said Laura Sánchez Alonso, a min­ing Engin­eer and Eco-Cement pro­ject coordin­at­or. ​“For instance, we don’t need to extract and trans­port the lime­stone com­monly used to pro­duce cement. And we also save the energy costs”. Less heat means lower cost and emis­sions, as James Stu­art, a sus­tain­able design con­sult­ant, explained: ​“In ordin­ary cement, they have to use very high tem­per­at­ures, up to 1,400−1,500 degrees Celsi­us in order to turn lime­stone into cement. That is part of the pro­cess. And that takes an awful lot of energy. Here we only need bac­teria to mul­tiply at 30 degrees. So that is a massive dif­fer­ence. And that amount of heat energy is saved because we are using a bio­lo­gic­al pro­cess to bind the particles togeth­er”. The way the bac­teria bind the particles togeth­er is by nat­ur­ally pro­du­cing cal­ci­um car­bon­ate. Ini­tial tests have proved prom­ising. Research­ers – micro­bi­o­lo­gists and chem­ists – are work­ing to help the bac­teria become more effi­cient. ​“It’s import­ant to know the ideal dens­ity of bac­teria in the mix,” said Linda Wit­tig, an indus­tri­al chem­ist with Fraunhofer-IFAM. ​“We’ve done research on that. We know for instance that great­er bac­teria dens­ity does not always mean that the product will be more resi­li­ent. On the con­trary, some­times bey­ond a cer­tain point, too many bac­teria can under­mine the strength of the final product. So we need to find the optim­al num­ber of cells to pro­duce the cement”. Pre­lim­in­ary res­ults of ongo­ing tests on the material’s plas­ti­city, elasti­city and res­ist­ance to stress or deform­a­tion are already show­ing the way for even­tu­al applic­a­tions. ​“We decided to use this mater­i­al as mor­tar and not as con­crete because it is not as strong as tra­di­tion­al con­crete. But it can be eas­ily trans­formed,” said Nikos Bakas, a civil engin­eer at Neapol­is Uni­ver­sity in Cyprus. Whatever the final applic­a­tions, research­ers hope the new mater­i­al could be a real­ity on European con­struc­tion sites in less than a dec­ade.

Pro­ject details:

  • Pro­ject acronym:ECO-CEMENT
  • Par­ti­cipants: Spain (Coordin­at­or), Ger­many (Fraunhofer IFAM), Italy, Cyprus, Ireland
  • Pro­ject Ref­er­ence N° 282922
  • Total cost: €2 138 511,05
  • EU con­tri­bu­tion: €1 598 295,65
  • Dur­a­tion: March 2012 — Feb­ru­ary 2015
  • CORD­IS-Link: http://​cord​is​.europa​.eu/​p​r​o​j​e​c​t​/​r​c​n​/​1​0​2​6​6​2​_​e​n​.html
  • Pro­ject Web­site: www​.eco​-cement​.eu
Source: European Commission
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