With ecomoonbattery, all that’s old is new again. Advanced, efficient technologies like internal combustion engines and nuclear reactors are rejected in favor of medieval technologies like windmills. As with our prehistoric forefathers, homes may be made not out of modern construction materials, but dirt:

Through a new approach to 3D printing, soil implanted with seeds can now be used as a concrete-like building material. Developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Virginia, this building technique could open up doors to a completely new kind of building, with finely tuned ecosystems of plants and bacteria forming the insulation, the structure, even the exteriors of homes. …

The team focused on small dome-shaped structures made of soil implanted with seeds. Balancing the quantity of soil, water, and seeds, and accounting for the compaction of pumping them all through the nozzle of a 3D printer, the team managed to create a small dome that was soon blossoming.

Sounds like a crude yurt that Fred Flintstone might live it, except with weeds growing out of the walls.

[Team leader Ji] Ma concedes that building with soil isn’t entirely new. “One of the oldest construction materials is soil,” he says, pointing to adobe buildings in the American Southwest and mud huts in Africa, for example. “People were building structures from soil long before they were building with concrete.”

The difference is, when savages built mud huts in centuries past, they didn’t draw generous pay as an assistant professor of materials science and engineering. Also, they weren’t saving the planet, because until recently carbon dioxide was good; the higher the levels, the more food, since it makes plants grow. Nowadays, CO2 is bad, because it makes the weather too warm according to leftist ideology.

Building with soil could also be a way to cut down the massive carbon footprint of buildings, particularly those made with carbon-intensive materials like concrete and steel. Embedding 3D-printed soil with plants could turn them into carbon sinks that absorb more CO2 than they produce.

Greenwashing the project by claiming it lowers harmless CO2 levels is sure to secure lavish government grants.

Related research involves making walls out of fungus. In Israel, they are working on dirt walls embedded with radish plants. Whatever it takes to combat carbon emissions.

On a tip from Steve T.

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