If you had asked me to describe “the flavor of charcoal” I would say “burnt,” and I could not tell you what was so convenient about gas. Which is all to say, I was not out here looking for a Spark grill, a Bluetooth-enabled “smart grill” that promises the flavor of charcoal with the convenience of gas.
Briqs wiki series#
Meanwhile I moved from a college dorm room to a series of airless NYC apartments, where the closest I got to grilling was roasting my ass on some fire escape grates. I was in college by the time my parents bought a little Weber, which sat in the garage and got wheeled out for the occasional burger night. I grew up in the suburbs with a backyard-but no grill in sight. K-Briq is currently being certified by regulators.Before I became a Spark Grill person, I was not a Grill Person at all. “We need to have ways of building sustainably, with affordable, good quality materials that will last.”Īn earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the K-Briq has British Board of Agreement certification.
This will increase production while reducing transport-related emissions, she says, because trucks can collect K-Briqs when they drop off construction waste. Over the next 18 months, Medero plans to get K-Briq machinery on-site at recycling plants. Boyle says that there are “contractors who would use tomorrow,” if they were being produced on a large scale. In Scotland, the government is reviewing a circular economy bill which encourages businesses to think creatively and economically about how they reuse and recycle materials. Other innovators include Qube, an India-based startup creating bricks out of plastic waste, and the ClickBrick which eliminates the use of cement through modular stacking (think real-life Lego). Zero Waste Scotlandīut despite the challenges, Kenoteq is far from being the only company trying to make construction more sustainable.
Gabriela Medero, co-founder of Kenoteq, came up with the idea for the K-Briq over a decade ago. Innovative startups need large contracts to allow them to scale, he says, but struggle to become competitive without a large operation already in place. He attributes the industry’s conservatism to a “chicken and egg” situation. Stephen Boyle is the program manager for construction at non-profit Zero Waste Scotland which, along with organizations including Scottish Enterprise and the Royal Academy of Engineering, has provided Kenoteq with funding. Geldermans says that the industry is notoriously slow to change – adding that legislation often lags far behind innovation, so construction companies are not incentivized to adopt sustainable practices and materials. Medero is looking at scaling up – but it’s hard to create a revolution in construction. Kenoteq currently operates one workshop in Edinburgh, which can produce three million K-Briqs a year. Gabriela Medero and Sam Chapman, co-founders of Kenoteq, say they have created a sustainable alternative to traditional fired clay bricks. With her university’s support, Medero joined forces with fellow engineer Sam Chapman and set up Kenoteq in 2009. As she became aware of the construction industry’s sustainability issues, she started looking for solutions. Originally from Brazil, Medero says she was drawn to civil engineering because it gave her passion for maths and physics a practical outlet.
That’s why Gabriela Medero, a professor of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmental Engineering at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, decided to reinvent it. The building blocks of modern suburban homes would be familiar to the city planners of ancient Babylon, the bricklayers of the Great Wall of China, or the builders of Moscow’s Saint Basil’s Cathedral.īut the brick as we know it causes significant environmental problems, by using up raw, finite materials and creating carbon emissions.
For thousands of years, the humble clay-fired brick hasn’t changed. Although we’re surrounded by millions of them every day, most of us don’t think about bricks too often.
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