By Michael J Coren

Technology to turn the millions of tons of waste from factories, building sites, and processing facilities into something besides landfill has led researchers to fabricate bricks out of TVs, computers, paper waste, incinerator ash, rubble and other materials that were conventionally considered useless.

Now Spanish researchers are fabricating bricks out of the 30 million tons or so of paper industry waste generated in the U.S. and Europe each year. Although their manufacture is not glamorous--the bricks emerge "like sausages" before being cut to size--they are structurally sound and divert tons of waste water sludge and cellulose residue into useful applications, state researchers publishing in the journal Fuel Processing Technology journal. The techniques also boosts bricks' insulating properties, while avoiding the use of new raw materials and energy. For now, they remain experimental. The waste bricks (generally up to 10% paper waste) have slightly less mechanical strength than traditional bricks (although still within legal limits), and pose complications as the percent of waste increases.

But other attempts to bring waste bricks to market are already far ahead. One of the most common is trucking concrete and asphalt from demolished buildings to reprocessors that can extract and recycle the wood, metal, and other debris, and then return pristine materials to make new buildings (you can see videos of the process here).

For Haiti, the island nation struck by a massive earthquake in 2010, recycling may be the only way forward. Vast swaths of the capital city Port-au-Prince are scheduled for demolition. Plans to turn that rubble into the next rebirth of the city are moving ahead, says Greg Moro, operations manager for Independence Recycling of Florida, not least because importing new materials is so expensive. Moro is working out a plan to crush the ruins of and leave recyclable material for rebuilding: "They want us to demolish buildings and recycle them into whatever useable products we can make, for example aggregates to be used in new concrete for future development."

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