Blood as a building material?

[jonb]

This is actually kind of an improvement. In times past, peasant houses used to be made out of cow shit (among other things).

My sister lived for years in a cottage built in the fourteenth century with wattle and daub walls which is exactly that and it was a dream home.

[Baruch]

Is that why real estate is so expensive in Britain ... you have to use a time machine to go back to the 1300s to get more wattle and daub? ;-)  At least Germans use gingerbread and candy ;-))

[SGOS]

Somehow I ran across this ..
http://inhabitat.com/could-bricks-made-of-animal-blood-be-the-future-of-construction/

Somehow I just can't help but think that people are just making shit up for something to write about.
"Could animal blood be the future of construction?"  Uhmmm...no?

For what it's worth, the house you live in almost certainly has some animal blood in it right now.  Back in the 60s, I worked in a plywood plant pulling veneer off the green chain.  The sheets were sent through a drier, sorted, and then given to layup crews consisting of 4 guys per crew.  One guy would feed strips of veneer through rollers which applied glue to both sides.  These were sandwiched between 4 X 8 sheets that make up the outside layers of a sheet of plywood.  There was one guy in the plant whose only job was to mix the glue.  No it wasn't some special glue that came in barrels.  The glue was basically manufactured right in the plant.  One time the foreman told me what went into glue.  As I recall, there were three main ingredients, two of which I can remember:  Blood and "caustic" (When I asked the foreman what "caustic" was, he said it was lye).  I can't remember the third ingredient.  The blood was not in liquid form.  It was dried cattle blood in the form of a powder, and came in 50 or 100 pound bags.  For whatever reason, it was shipped to the United States from Argentina.  I guess our own slaughter houses didn't know cow's blood had any value, but the plant bought the stuff by the box car load.

[jonb]

Is that why real estate is so expensive in Britain ... you have to use a time machine to go back to the 1300s to get more wattle and daub? ;-)  At least Germans use gingerbread and candy ;-))

No our land prices are more because of restrictive land use, and that it has become the mainstay of this economy.
Most of the money now earned from overseas comes from the financial sectors. Our industry having been killed of by a political class that is trained for the administration of an empire we no longer have rather than being educated in the needs of trade.
So ever increasing house prices draws money in from abroad and keeps the economy going as long as the government can make the economy look stable. Essentially it is a ponzi scheme that has not yet popped. The problem is though that the longer it goes on the more other sectors of the British economy it kills off. But any politician that tried to stop it would cause an immediate collapse so they just kick the can down the road and on it goes.

And you don't have to go back to the middle ages to find bull shit, it is produced all over the place.

[Baruch]

Dried blood has been used as an adhesive for millennia.  Early cattle keeping peoples would slit their livestock for a little blood in order to bind their own wounds if they were short on their own blood, or to help glue the arrowhead better with the string and stick.  And probably the feathers on the other end of the arrow as well.  Nomadic people would drink their own horse's blood, when mare's milk was short.  But really, in modern times, exposure to blood-borne diseases is avoidable thru cooking, just don't get exposure beforehand.

[Hakurei Reimu]

I donno, we'd still be trading the smell of blood for the smell of shit...

[jonb]

Have you seen the price of whale snot? The delight of people with it on their skin. There are many who say the gland on a dear's anus produces the very sent of heaven.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Sure blood and other animal parts have been used for a very long time, but the future of construction?  Nah..

[Baruch]

Emergency construction, like Han stuffing Luke inside his dead animal ride, so he can survive the nighttime cold?  On the other hand, with the fall of civilization and N America turning into a multi-ethnic version of pre-Columbian culture ... we will need to build teepees in some climes.