A man from Quintana Roo, Mexico who invented a brick partially made out of sargassum seaweed has now built 13 “sargablock” homes for low-income families.
Omar Vázquez Sánchez came up with the idea of making bricks with sargassum in 2018, when he was already selling the seaweed as a fertilizer to customers at his nursery. His first sargablock building was modeled after his grandmother’s small home.
He now has 16 full-time employees dedicated to collecting sargassum and making bricks with it. The smelly, unsightly seaweed washes up on the white-sand beaches of Quintana Roo – sometimes in huge quantities – during the lengthy annual sargassum season.
His bricks are made from ground sargassum, limestone and other organic material. The sargassum content of each sargablock is about 40%. The sargassum mixture is fed into a block-making machine, which compresses and molds it…
Read full article originally published on naturalbuildingblog.com