'Green brick' awarded top honour at IIT-Bombay

'Green brick' awarded top honour at IIT-Bombay

Mumbai: Growing vegetation in bricks may sound futuristic, but this idea has won Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay’s competition — ‘10 great ideas to change the world in the next 50 years’.
An alumnus of IIT-Bombay, and currently a design consultant, Sanjeev Shekhar, has designed a ‘green brick’ which can have specific native plants or seeds integrated in it. The aim is to redefine building blocks and substitute conventional bricks or concrete blocks with a ‘living’ brick for mass use.
He has proposed that these “intelligent, modular and structural living bricks” will become a source of nutrition, vitamins and herbal medicine. It will be part structural, part biological, and will be integral to the building structure. Each home can become an independent seed bank.
“They would gradually transform the city’s infrastructure into a productive, healthy, edible and playful green fabric. They would also act as green filters, thereby reducing heat,” said Shekhar. For his “ubiquitous planting and green bricks” idea, Shekhar won Rs5 lakh.
“This idea was really different from the rest. It aims at making us greener and has both environmental and climatic advantages.
However, the idea needs to be developed, which will include aspects like the strength of the brick and how it can sustain such vegetation within a building,” said Rajeev Deshpande, chief development officer, IIT-Bombay.
Shekhar is currently working on product development strategy, integration of green bricks within the building envelope, and their structural capability. “The idea’s success will depend on collaborative research with plant and ceramic scientists.
We would like to set up bio-labs in botanical gardens in India and Europe to begin on-site prototyping,” he said. Shekhar has been invited by R Chidambaram, principal scientific advisor to the government of India, to build a prototype.
The second finalist is professor Dipankar Sarkar, adjunct faculty at IIT-Bombay’s department of electrical engineering, who won Rs2 lakh for his idea on high-efficiency lighting.
He, along with Atul Seksaria, an IIT-B alumnus, has proposed lighting which is three to four times more efficient than LEDs. “Such efficiency is unheard of and will imply new and improved tube lights with better battery life, besides being very cheap,” said Deshpande.

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