With several Indian cities now being in a perpetual construction mode, old buildings are being torn down to make new ones. Buildings are broken down through a messy process that raises clouds of dust and leaves hardly any room to salvage any of the material, leaving enormous amount of debris. In this age where more people are becoming aware about conservation, and the mantra ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ is what we swear by, a Swedish student has come up with the ultimate tool: a robot that gobbles up the concrete from buildings.
Known as the Ero Robot (Ero standing for erosion), the invention by Omer Haciomeroglu, a student at Sweden’s Umeå Institute of Design, separates the concrete from metal rods and other material on buildings, on the spot. The energy efficient machine was awarded the 2013 International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) in the Student Designs category, says Inhabitat website, which is dedicated to green design, innovation, and the future of clean technology.
The Ero Robot works by using water to break down the concrete, after which the separate raw material like sand and cement are stored separately. “High-pressure water jets attack the micro cracks on the concrete surface, making it come apart,” explains Omer, on the website. “It leaves the metal rebar inside naked and ready for reuse.”
Apart from not polluting the environment, the Ero Robot offers another advantage; it cuts the cost of transportation. Omer is quoted by Inhabitat as saying that he envisions a new business model: “When a building comes down, the demolition crew could set up a station nearby to turn the materials into new prefabricated building blocks, and then those could be sold directly to someone constructing a new building in the neighborhood.”
The Ero Robot, a concept for now, runs on electric power and even reuses some of its own energy; as the vacuum sucks down concrete, the moving air generates electricity, which can be reused.
Manufacturers are looking at the Ero Robot with interest and once Omer settles on a partnership with one of them, a prototype will be built and tested. With much demand for it, we can expect the Ero Robot to be manufactured commercially in about three years.
Statistics say that the US produces about 300 million metric tonnes of concrete waste every year and that only about 5 per cent of concrete is recycled currently in China, where construction is taking place at a rampant pace, with old buildings being razed down to make way for new structures.
“In Asia, there’s a lot of potential,” Omer is quoted as saying on the website Fastcoexist.com, a website that focuses on innovation in technology, design ethical economics and leadership. “But this can be used everywhere. Even in Europe, they’re demolishing a lot of concrete buildings and they don’t know how to recycle, so they’re wasting that valuable
material. Ero is a smarter way to do it. I wanted to design a role-model product that would show the industry how to approach demolition in a different and provocative way.”
— annie@newindianexpress.com