Hasta La Ideas

Circular manufacturing doesn’t work with conventional masonry. Once you lay bricks or cinderblocks and mortar them into place, you can’t practically smash them up to make new bricks or blocks. But a team of engineers at MIT has figured out that you can—if you use glass.

The team has successfully produced 3D-printed glass bricks, and their feedstock is molten recycled glass. “In mechanical testing, a single glass brick withstood pressures similar to that of a concrete block,” they write. Moreover, the bricks can be melted down and re-printed.

“Glass is a highly recyclable material,” says Kaitlyn Becker, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “We’re taking glass and turning it into masonry that, at the end of a structure’s life, can be disassembled and reassembled into a new structure, or can be stuck back into the printer and turned into a completely different shape. All this builds into our idea of a sustainable, circular building material.”

The bricks are printed in a figure-8 shape, and have two protruding pegs in the top, with corresponding holes in the bottom. This allows the bricks to lock together.

What they haven’t addressed, or explained, are the details of any required mortar. They only say “Another material placed between the bricks prevent scratches or cracks between glass surfaces but can be removed if a brick structure were to be dismantled and recycled, also allowing bricks to be remelted in the printer and formed into new shapes.” It’s not clear what that material is.

The team has successfully built a curved wall with the bricks, and next aims to build larger self-supporting structures for evaluation. “We’re thinking of stepping stones to buildings,” says Kaitlyn Becker, MIT Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, “and want to start with something like a pavilion — a temporary structure that humans can interact with, and that you could then reconfigure into a second design. And you could imagine that these blocks could go through a lot of lives.”

The printing technology was developed by MIT spinoff Evenline, whose machines can do what you see above and below.