The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals served as the project's main motivation [1]. We especially decided to concentrate on the following 3 objectives:
For developing economies to succeed, infrastructure development and modernization as well as sustainable industrialization are essential.
There is a pressing need to provide safe housing and public services - more than a billion people currently live in slums and unsafe environments. The demand for new construction is further increased by growing urbanization [2]. Infrastructure is also required for essential services including sanitation, health, education, mobility, and information. Globally, these objectives aren't being satisfied, which poses significant problems for the sustainability and security of cities to accommodate rising demands [3].
We need to take urgent action to tackle climate change and its impacts by reducing emissions and encouraging advancements in renewable energy. Every aspect of our environment and way of life is currently being impacted by climate change, from food production and declining biodiversity to rising temperatures and sea levels.
The global south is disproportionately affected by climate change - despite having the lowest environmental footprint per capita on average, it is more affected by the impacts of climate change – reaching higher temperatures, and frequently experiencing extreme weather conditions [4]. Construction and production of building materials contribute 11% annually to CO2 emissions, making them a substantial contributor [6].
Building the urgently needed new infrastructure is constrained by the environmental damage brought on by new construction, which not only exacerbates climate change but also adversely affects development by lowering the quality of the air and water and posing health risks. Command and control policies, introduction of carbon taxes, and other interventions aim to raise costs and decrease overall construction. However, this disproportionately affects developing nations as the higher costs are harder for them to bear while they also have a greater need for new infrastructure [5].
Our project aims to support the development of resilient infrastructure, encourage inclusive and sustainable industrialization, create safe cities and human settlements, and simultaneously take immediate action to prevent climate change and its effects. The production of building materials and new construction are crucial to achieving these goals, but they are constrained by the severe environmental consequences. Our bricks work to overcome this restriction by being less carbon-intensive to produce, as well as by sequestering the CO2 that has already been produced, making our product carbon-negative and assisting in further lowering emissions. In our human practices work and proposed implementation, we are lead by the UN sustainable development goals to engineer and design our project for a better global impact.