Archinect - News

Researchers have found ways to use mushrooms to decarbonize construction waste

2022-10-21T14:59:00-04:00

Megadeveloper Lendlease is one of the entities behind a new study into the use of mushrooms as a means of decarbonizing construction waste through their application on discarded asphalt roofing shingles.

The company teamed with Rubicon Technologies, Mycocycle, and Rockwood Sustainable Solutions to complete a pilot project at the latter’s facility in Lebanon, Tennessee.

Image courtesy Mycocycle

Shingles removed from a total of 214 homes following a recent re-roofing project at the U.S. Army’s Fort Campbell installation in nearby Kentucky were then broken down thanks to an infused mix of three different strains of fungi in a process called mycoremediation.

"Every asphalt shingle from those 214 homes would have gone to a landfill," Sara Neff, Head of Sustainability at Lendlease Americas, said of the 11 to 13 million tons of the product the EPA estimates winds up in landfills annually.

Image courtesy Mycocycle

"There was simply no viable use for them," she continued. "We understand the i...

Of Dirt and Cleanliness – (Clean India Campaign)

2014-10-07T12:00:00-04:00

"In all modern cultures, cleaning up merely involves moving “dirt” from one place to another. Five decades ago, cleaning up may have been easier. It would have meant restoring the predominantly organic and compostable discards in the waste stream to its rightful place – namely, the soil – and facilitating its transformation into manure. Over the past two decades, India has transformed from a sleepy nation living in its villages to an economic powerhouse with an urban population bursting at its seams. We can, as Modi did in the UN General Assembly, invoke our ancient culture to claim that Indians have a special relationship with and reverence for nature. But that does not take away from the fact that Indians or Americans, Hindus or Muslims, we are all worshippers of the same homogenising religion of consumerism. We are what our garbage is. Our garbage which once bore no resemblance to American garbage is increasingly peppered with the same brand names, the same indestructible materi...

Turning waste into building blocks of the future city

2013-07-12T12:32:00-04:00

What if the rubbish was refabricated to become real urban spaces or buildings? If it is plausible to adapt current machinery, how much material is available? At first sight, any sanitary landfill may be viewed as an ample supply of building materials. Heavy industrial technologies crush cars or to automatically sort out garbage are readily available. 3-D printing has exhausting capabilities if adjusted to larger scales.