Elon Musk venture to provide low cost bricks

Elon Musk’s latest venture; the Boring Company, has confirmed that it will be developing a low cost building material from its tunnel excavations.

2016 saw the entrepreneur and environmental champion tweet about his disdain for Los Angeles commuting traffic, saying: “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” Which he swiftly followed up with the creation of the Boring Company, developed to create a mass private transport system with users shuttled via tunnels under cities. Conversations with LA city officials have seen the plan accelerate and the Boring Company has recently purchased its first boring machine.

Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has followed this announcement with confirmation that there are plans to use earth removed by the machines as a low cost building material.

“The Boring Company will be using dirt from tunnel digging to create bricks for low cost housing,” he tweeted on Monday.

In typical tunneling projects, excavated dirt is shipped offsite to disposal locations, a process which is costly, time-consuming, noisy, and can be environmentally hazardous. The Boring Company is investigating technologies that will recycle the earth into useful bricks to be used to build structures; a process used for construction throughout history, including the Pyramids. These bricks can potentially be used as a portion of the tunnel lining itself, which is typically built from concrete, as well as for low-cost housing. According to The Boring Company, concrete production accounts for 4.5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the earth bricks would reduce both environmental impact and tunneling costs.

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