Eco homes of the future could be made from bricks of bacteria. It sounds odd, but it's now possible to "biomanufacture" sturdy bricks by mixing sand with a solution of bacteria that is non-toxic and non-pathenogenic, of course. If every brick in the world were made this way, it would reduce CO2 emissions by over 800 million tons every year.
Bricks are a common building material around the world in part because they're so cheap and easy to manufacture, and they last a long time. The problem is that every brick that's produced in the traditional way ends up adding an average of 1.4 pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere. This is mostly due to the fact that curing bricks requires heating them in kilns that are typically fired with coal. However, a professor of architecture at the American University of Sharjah in Abu Dhabi has now come up with a cleaner way of making bricks that doesn't involve heating because it uses bacteria instead.
