Danger Dust

What if construction materials could be put together and taken apart as easily as LEGO bricks? Such reconfigurable masonry would be disassembled at the end of a building's lifetime and reassembled into a new structure, in a sustainable cycle that could supply generations of buildings using the same physical building blocks.

That's the idea behind circular construction, which aims to reuse and repurpose a building's materials whenever possible, to minimize the manufacturing of new materials and reduce the construction industry's "embodied carbon," which refers to the greenhouse gas emissions associated with every process throughout a building's construction, from manufacturing to demolition.

In mechanical testing, a single glass brick withstood pressures similar to that of a concrete block. As a structural demonstration, the researchers constructed a wall of interlocking glass bricks. They envision that 3D-printable glass masonry could be reused many times over as recyclable bricks for building facades and internal walls.