A new brick has been developed using recycled municipal waste for use on the facade of the new Design Museum Gent extension in the city of Ghent in Belgium.

The new wing, which is being built as part of a major renovation project at the museum, will feature the bricks on its facade. The lime-cured brick was made from local waste to meet the client’s brief to lower the embodied carbon used in the project’s construction.

The brick was developed through a collaborative approach involving Design Museum Gent, sogent, BC Materials and Local Works Studio along with London-based architectural practice Carmody Groarke, and TRANS architectuur | stedenbouw, a Ghent based practice. The project was funded by a generous grant from Circular Flanders and sogent, on behalf of the city of Ghent.

“The building’s facade has been designed to reference the light-toned civic buildings in Ghent. The pale coloured brick and white mortar is composed of locally sourced municipal waste streams as aggregate including crushed concrete and white glass with lime as the primary binding agent,” Carmody Groarke explained.

“All composite materials have been carefully selected to create a white tone. The waste materials are meticulously filtered and sorted at a production centre in the centre of Ghent before being pressed into their specified shape and size.”

The new bricks, which contain 63% waste, deliver multiple advantages to any building project, says Carmody Groarke. The bricks are cured rather than fired, adding strength from carbonation. The hydraulic lime captures CO2 from the atmosphere during the curing, sequestering carbon over the life of the building. The low embodied carbon properties of the material will deliver the required strength and resilience for use in external conditions.

This fabrication process, coupled with the use of recycled composites results in a brick with a third of the embodied carbon of a Belgian clay fired brick over a 60-year lifecycle.

According to TRANS architectuur, the low carbon bricks are certified and declared fit-for-use, and have been tested against European norms.

To be manufactured on a brownfield site in Ghent, the bricks will use a clean production process, without emissions, by-products or waste – a process that could easily be replicated in other urban settings.

Branko Miletic

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