How could cattle become any more useful? Their hide is already used to produce leather, their milk is used for cheese butter and, well, milk, they taste great in a burger and continue to serve as draft animals in many parts of the world. British architecture school graduate Jack Munro has found a way to make a building material using one of the few materials from cattle that currently largely goes to waste – blood.
Munro’s “Blood Bricks” are created by first mixing fresh blood with an anticoagulant (EDTA) to prevent it thickening too quickly. Although he used bullocks, blood from other animals could also be used. He then adds sodium azide as a preservative to prevent decomposition and bacteria growth. After a number of unsuccessful attempts at creating a glue by adding chemicals such as glacial acetic acid, Munro turned to the simpler combination of blood and water that is then mixed with sand.
Placing the resulting mixture in formwork and baking it for an hour at 70° C (158° F) for an hour causes the blood proteins to coagulate to produce a stable, waterproof brick. With Munro estimating that 30 liters (7.9 gal US) of blood could be recovered from a single bullock and sand plentiful, he believes Blood Bricks have the potential to replace mud bricks as a building material in arid regions.
To this end, he is looking to raise enough money to build a prototype home using Blood Bricks in Siwa, Egypt. If he's successful, we might start seeing a lot of "red brick" homes being built in similar areas.
ew but still
and in some far off primitive country, will they have molds, ovens, the other chemicals.?
ew again
wle
Interesting idea though.
If you look at the amount of crop you would need to replace animals in our diet (and if you don't calculate animal feed as if every bit of it comes from dedicated cropland--much of it comes from human crop waste and processing byproducts), meat actually takes up less land than the equivalent in vegetative calories and nutrients.
Blood used in animal feed will probably become less popular and less legal with mad cow disease and new potential diseases.
The Hajj probably results in a lot of spare blood. Muslims are not supposed to consume it but they don't seem to have any shortage of sand. With some desalination they might get into the brick production and export business.