Julian Ellis-Brown

Nature has the power to offer symbiotic connections with material production, but our current relationship with natural resources is one of exploitation rather than collaboration. The Ventnor Brickworks tells a story of how we might revert our conditioned ideas of what that relationship looks like by taking a costly waste stream of kelp and turning it into valuable construction materials for global and local contexts.

The Ventnor Brickworks is a new form of distributed, low energy, low cost production of eco-friendly building materials. With the innovative addition of kelp as a key ingredient, energy savings are made across the entire brick making process.

The resulting product is a carbon-negative building material with comparative strength of clay bricks, displaying impressive insulating properties, and a more sustainable life cycle.

The Brickworks fits inside a standard 12m shipping container. This modular form reduces cost of set-up, creates distributed, mobile and deliverable manufacturing hubs, and takes the production right to the source of the raw elements.

This enables places like Ventnor to redefine their relationship with a costly waste stream, to produce valuable assets.

The Ventnor Brickworks: building a sustainable future, brick by brick.

The Ventnor Original recipe was created after a long experimentation process of many iterations exploring bioplastics, natural binders, adobe-building, cross-linking and bio-polymers. The final Ventnor Brickworks process utilises a number of mechanisms to have such a small carbon impact.

Sodium alginate, found in the cell walls of kelp, can be used as a biopolymer when mixed with water to glue aggregate together. Alginates are usually extracted from heavy industrial processes, but by harnessing this chemical from simply ground kelp, large carbon savings are achieved. The gluing effect also omits the need for sintering by firing, allowing the curing temperatures to be a 10th of traditional clay bricks.

From using an additional natural polysaccharide, the internal structure of the bricks takes an aerated form, which allows more airflow for curing throughout, improved insulation properties and gives it half the density of clay, reducing transport emissions.

The Ventnor Brickwork’s signature product is the Ventnor Original, a structural brick that boasts high thermal and acoustic insulating properties, at a fraction of the ecological and financial cost. The Ventnor Original can replace not only toxic thermally insulating materials, it also negates the need for further structural support from panel frames or other brick constructions, removing the ecological impact from two carbon-heavy sources.

The bricks have been tested for flame retardancy, compressive strength, thermal conductivity and acoustic insulation alongside compatibility with modern technologies such as additive manufacturing. At the end of the bricks life, they can be easily recycled to be used again in another context.

The Ventnor Original was unable to be tested in lab facilities due to the extenuating circumstances, therefore the material was instead benchmarked against clay bricks, and existing insulation. It outperforms the clay and the Celotex in acoustic insulation, thermal conductivity and of course, the carbon footprint. Although hard to measure precisely with a car, it is in the same magnitude of strength as clay, but a little weaker.