Glass Houses and Porous Bricks: the House of theFuture from Geofusion.

BROMSGROVE, England -- If researchers and engineers from the UK have their way, the construction world will abandon 5,000 years of clay brick manufacture - and we'll all be living in glass houses.

Engineers from technology company Geofusion have

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Geofusion - backed by a multi-million pound investment from Credit Suisse - will have a UK factory within a year, producing bricks made of recycled glass, including glass waste which is currently expensive or impossible to recycle, and which ends up in landfill sites (coloured glass, TV and computer screens in particular).

A further four factories - based in the UK and Europe - are planned in the first phase of growth and the company plans to license further manufacturing outside the UK. The technology is being targeted at developers requiring high levels of renewable materials in their buildings.

The bricks look just like a conventional brick but involve no 'extractive' work - so the days of huge unsightly open quarries which currently provide the millions of tonnes of clay consumed by the construction industry annually could be limited.

But the technology - which can also be used to make paving stones and 'slips' (tiles) - has some hidden secrets: if necessary, the pavers can be made 'porous'. Water engineers say floods and water shortages can be caused by urban and commercial developments which disrupt the flow of rainwater back to the land. Construction engineers have struggled for years with a variety of solutions - but all have serious drawbacks. Geofusion's porous bricks will allow them to capture the rainwater falling on car-parks and buildings (including the walls), and reuse it.

The company says the glass-based pavers can be recycled several times, meaning they could be used to create the world's first totally recyclable building. They can be made with greater precision than traditional baked bricks, and quantities and costs can be controlled more easily. They can be colour matched precisely, and the manufacturing process uses considerably less energy.

Geofusion's website is at www.geo-fusion.co.uk.

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