Building furniture with bacteria
Interview with
Could bacteria create large building structures, or the furniture that we sit on?
Aurélie - My name is Aurélie Mossé, I'm a textile designer by background and currently working as a design-led researcher in École des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a school of art and design, where I lead one of the research groups called Soft Matters. So in our group, we are interested as the overall question to understand how new materials, new technologies, or maybe some of them that we have forgotten for a long time, can be helpful to design a more sustainable future. And one of the things we look at more specifically is really to see how biological processes, our living organisms, can help us craft things in a more sustainable way.
Chris - What sorts of materials do you have in mind?
Aurélie - We work with mainly soft materials, which means fabrics or paper, but we also use the term soft to actually talk about materials that engage a chemistry which is soft, so that does not impact the environment and organisms that live within it.
Chris - Obviously, buildings need tough materials to make them strong. So if you're just working with things that are soft and flimsy like paper, they may not be ideal under all circumstances. So what are you trying to do to come up with materials that might better fit that purpose?
Aurélie - So we work with a process that is possible thanks to bacteria, we call it biocalcification, and the idea is to make soft materials harder, stronger, and this is because the organism is producing mineral that is applied to the soft materials and give it a shell or a stronger aspect.
Chris - So you could take something that's like a paper mold and then make something that's much stronger?
Aurélie - Basically, we place the living organism on the material and we give him specific ingredients to create a chemical reaction and then release the mineral onto and within the soft material and the paper in our case.
Chris - So what sorts of minerals could you deposit in this way then?
Aurélie - So we work with a specific bacteria, which is a calcifying bacteria, and in our case, it's just producing calcite, which is a source of calcium, which is present very widely in nature and is also renewable.
Chris - Not dissimilar really to bone or the kinds of shells that shellfish put around themselves then?
Aurélie - Yes, exactly. We have that in our body, in our bones, in our teeth, and we find it very commonly in different places in nature.
Chris - In essence then, you could have a bone house, you could have a paper set of walls, impregnate them with these microbes, feed them appropriately, and they would lay down calcium?
Aurélie - Yes, as long as they are happy to grow on the material and you give them enough ingredients, we know it works well on any sort of cellulose-based ingredients, I would say, or materials.
Chris - Cellulose being obviously one component of wood, so you could literally start with paper and build a sort of model of the surface you want to calcify and then presumably get the bacteria growing on there and they would produce almost like a coating that was the calcium, the hard surface.
Aurélie - It's not only a coating but also gets inside the material so it can really be structural, but it's probably easier to grow the material that you want at the scale of a brick or a furniture than at the scale of the wall building because it means you will need to control or help bacteria to grow on a very large surface.
Chris - I was going to follow up and say, well, how big can we go with this? Because obviously there are a number of dimensions to consider. There's not just the x and y, you know, like a piece of A4 or a piece of A3 paper. There's the z dimension, the how high and how thick as well. So talk us through how this actually works practically.
Aurélie - So in our case, we grow the bacteria on a paper form and we work at a relatively small scale because it's a new process or a new material that we have developed. But we know engineers that are working with the same bacteria and they rigidify or stabilise saws at a much bigger scale. So it's not crazy to think that we could upscale the process at a much larger scale. We hope in two years' time that maybe we can demonstrate that we can borrow a chair or maybe the frame of a window, for instance. It requires a bit of development. And in our case, the challenge is that you need to inject or to expose material and the bacteria to a certain amount of water. So the bigger the elements you want to calcify or rigidify, the bigger the water container for it. So you probably don't want to do that at the scale of the building and therefore things more like bricks or modular components.
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