“Weird and Wacky Wednesday” 5-24-23

Here’s a sign that maybe — just maybe — we’ve taken recycling a bit too far. Engineers in Japan built a single-story house using recycled dirty diapers as part of the concrete.  Now before you start to think that the walls could bleed baby poop, that offending material was removed by the engineers by tearing apart the used diapers, washing them and “then the remaining offending agents were neutralized with a chemical soak.”  The researchers then dried and shredded the diapers into a usable concrete additive. They found that up to 40% of concrete’s sand could be swapped for diaper shreds for non-load-bearing walls — with a total of 8% of all the concrete and mortar used to build the 380-square-foot house swapped for the diapers.