Design Museum Gent helps create a hyperlocal, waste-based brick for its new extension

To connect the three buildings it's housed in, Design Museum Gent is adding a new wing. It's also been rethinking what a building material can and should be. The extension's facade is constructed of light-colored bricks that blend in with other civic buildings in the Belgian city. But rather than digging up clay and firing new bricks, the museum's architects, Carmody Groarke, worked with material designers to develop a waste-based brick.

The Gent Waste Brick is made of local waste materials — primarily concrete and glass — crushed into a coarse powder. Lime is added as a binding agent, and the mixture is pressed into bricks that are cured instead of fired. While curing, lime captures CO2 from the atmosphere, sequestering carbon for as long as the bricks remain intact.

The entire process takes place within the city center and results in one-third of the CO2 emissions of a Belgian clay-fired brick. Production is clean and straightforward, without leaving by-products or waste, and can easily be copied to other cities.