A group of students from Prasetiya Mulya Business School in Indonesia recently won the 2009 Global Social Venture Competition with their “EcoFaeBrick“, a quality, easily manufactured, low-cost sustainable building material made from cow dung. The bricks are not only 20% lighter, but they have a compressive strength 20% stronger than clay bricks and their production doesn’t rely upon devastating quarry mining techniques.
The EcoFaeBrick mission is to provide a highly economical solution to a waste problem while helping to curb the destruction of the local environment caused by clay quarries (pictured below). The bricks are made using 75% cow manure and cured in a biogas heating process that reduces the brick factory’s CO2 emissions significantly over traditional wood fire heat.
EcoFaeBrick claims that the process will raise participating farmers’ incomes by 53%, which will help to raise their quality of life (and hopefully they will hire and teach some ex-clay miners how to farm). All in all this seems like a win-win venture and it is nice to see GSVC recognizing the development and helping to spread awareness for the technology. A warm congratulations from Inhabitat!
+ Global Social Venture Competition
Via Bustler
It seems that every time you announce a technology that utilizes animal waste you give it a title like \”POO BRICKS\”. I think you are doing a disservice to the technology and the people developing it. If you want people to take something seriously you need to take it seriously yourself. The \”icky\” way a topic is treated perpetuates the \”icky\” perception. Love the blog just tired of the childishness.
I’m going to have to kindly disagree. This is a new take on some ancient ideas and should not be taken lightly, however this blog provides a light and fun tone for things. I hardly find the title ‘icky’ and personally think that the way we handle waste (especially our own in the West) is long overdue for an overhaul. If people insist on looking at it is something serious and horrible it will never make its way back into the system and we will continue dumping (sorry) our nutrients into the ocean rather than completing the cycle locally.
i agree with Trey, this is an ancient practice in india. If you do see in villages they have been doing this for ages. I do not believe they should get credit for simply making this idea mainstream. It\’s very old and all they should get credit for is proving that it is efficient compared to the original bricks used now.
Gives new meaning to the term “brick-shit house”.
holy shit!
we have 1000 cows and we are prepared to sell the cow dung to brick manufacturers
interested pl contact us with your price /ton
schakrapani
62 type 4 qtrs block 13 neyveli 607803 t nadu cell 09952533579
cgayathri2@rediffmail.com
chakrapani.s@nlcindia.com
Sri govardhanagiri trust
car street
udupi
576101
dkarnataka
great……long live the cow!
iscowpmauritius.co.cc
[...] could automatically collect rubble from torn-down buildings and transform the material into new bricks? That’s exactly what designers Youngwoo Park, Hoyoung Lee and Miyeon Kim are proposing with [...]
i want to know how to make cow dung brick. i want to start a unit of cow dung brick manufacturing.
sucheta
as.sidar3@gmail.com
please provide me the details of the project and know how.i want to start manufacturing the bricks from cowdung in rajasthan jaipur.
awesome!
WE WANT TO START COWDUNG BRICK UNIT IN LUDHIANA PUNJAB INDIA CON YOU HELP ME IN WAIT D.S.OBEROI