Rubble from Bombed Ukrainian Buildings Is Being Turned into LEGO-like Blocks to Make New Homes (WATCH)
An Australian startup has created the world’s first mobile brick factory that pulverizes rubble from ruined buildings and presses them into LEGO-like bricks.
Idealized as the ultimate in long-term housing solutions for disaster areas, locals who need shelter can place the rubble from their ruined homes inside the machine and within a few days will have thousands of bricks with which to build sturdy homes.
If one thinks about it, ‘rubble’ is a word that has many meanings. In all its depth, rubble implies the presence of clay-based brick, cement or concrete, shattered glass, perhaps metal rebar or drywall. But most critically, rubble generally entails a harrowing, traumatic experience in a human heart.
It was this tragic aspect that led Manfred Him and Blake Stacey to design a machine that would help locals turn their shattered lives into new hope—recycling disaster into relief.
While today’s disasters are a fleeting feature in the 24-hour news cycle, Mobile Crisis Construction (MCC) has utilized the continual coverage of the war in Ukraine to gather enough funding to get their project well and truly on the road.
“In a few weeks after the war started, some pictures came to be seen, and I saw this old lady sitting in front of her completely destroyed house and it just cut deep to my heart,” said Hin, in a video produced by MCC. “And in my heart I said, ‘I can help this woman.’”
The MCC brick factory ticks many boxes. It’s mounted inside a shipping container for quick and easy transport around the world. Rubble is mixed with cement, which when clay-like soil is added, cures the bricks without the need of a high-temperature kiln. For this reason, it also doesn’t need significant power to work and can be run on a generator in areas where the grid is down.
Each mobile factory requires 120,000 Australian dollars to be shipped to Ukraine, arriving ready to be fully operational with minimal local input and minimal local expertise to operate. The bricks are produced in a LEGO-like, interlocking fashion that doesn’t require mortar—and in areas where it’s available, rebar can be inserted into holes running through the center of the bricks to reinforce them.
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MCC has plans to establish the initial rebuilding efforts in a relatively safe area near Kyiv, and expand operations into other areas as needed, dependent on funding.
The first project, a collaboration with a local foundation, will rebuild several townhouses. “It’s very simple construction, all in a row,” Nic Matich, one of the co-founders of MCC, told Fast Company. “It’s sort of a test case.”
With unlimited cement, clay, and rubble, a single machine can make up to 8,000 bricks per day and MCC estimates it can produce enough blocks to construct 10 small homes every three days, or one schoolhouse.
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Stacey explains that he has spent his whole career around bricks. “If you’re a doctor you do your thing, but for me I make bricks, so I do my thing. You could say it’s a labor of love,” he said with tears in his eyes.
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