This architect transforms used textiles into bricks

Brut America

Transforming used textiles into eco-friendly bricks. This is FabBRICK's approach to preventing waste.    Brut nature met Clarisse, the architect behind this project.   With ChangeNOW Summit

Transcript

00:00So this is a brick factory, it's made with recycled textile, so it contains about two

00:10t-shirts that should normally go to the trash and with these bricks we can make furniture

00:14or insulating acoustic and thermal tiles.

00:17It is urgent and very important to find new gutters to recycle clothes.

00:39In France, when you want to throw away your clothes, you can give them a second life by

00:42putting them in bins that were intended for this purpose in the streets and you can

00:45even put clothes that are too damaged, torn, holed, since they can be recycled.

00:49I receive the already crumpled textile from a company that collects the textile.

00:54Here, these are only clothes that were too damaged to be resold.

00:57Then we can choose the color of the textile, as here it is 100% recycled jeans, so 100%

01:02cotton, so it's really a better insulating and in fact we choose the color above the

01:06crumpling to adapt to different projects.

01:08I was a student in architecture and I was looking for a way to build differently.

01:12So I made different prototypes with different ecological glue, different ways to put the

01:17textile in the mold to compress it and I came up with a prototype that held up well,

01:22that reacts well to fire and that also holds to humidity.

01:29So to start, we weigh the textile to put exactly the same dose in each brick.

01:34Then we mix it with an ecological glue that I developed for the project, so it's exclusively

01:38biosourced and non-pollutant ingredients, and then we mix everything and we mix it

01:42so that the textile fiber impregnates it well.

01:44And now it's ready to be compressed in the machine.

01:51And then I pre-tasse.

01:55So now we're going to compress the bricks mechanically and it's a machine that I

01:58developed for the project that doesn't use any energy at all.

02:02This machine is ready to be ejected.

02:04So we open the top of the cylinder.

02:15Then the bricks dry naturally for two weeks.

02:18To have more space, after a week, we turn them over like this.

02:21And these are wall bricks.

02:23They are all thin and in fact they are just used as decoration for tiles.

02:27So the bricks that are here, they are thicker, so we can build with them.

02:30In fact, they are structural.

02:31The advantage of recycling textile is that the cotton present in our clothes is a very

02:35good insulator, both in acoustic and thermal, and the glue used to make the bricks makes

02:39it waterproof and fire-resistant.

02:41Since the beginning of the project, I have made 12,000 bricks.

02:44So that's about five tons of recycled textile.

02:46Today, bricks are mainly used for decoration, so to make furniture or tiles.

02:50But in the future, I would like to continue the research to see if there is a way to

02:54make a real building material.

02:55I had already done a few tests during the research, which had shown a great potential

02:59for the brick.

03:00And I know that we can build with it, and why not make carrying walls in homes.

03:04In addition to limiting textile waste, Fabrique offers a solution in the field of construction

03:08that is very energy-intensive and very polluting, to limit the use of natural resources such

03:12as sand, wood or oil.

03:14I am quite proud of the evolution of Fabrique, since at the beginning it was a school project.

03:18Less than six months ago, I delivered seven construction sites.

03:21And today I have a first employee.

03:22It's going to be super dense.

03:23I think there will be more and more ecological material, since there are many architects

03:26who use recycling in their projects today.

03:28And I think it's really a good approach to limit our waste production.

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