Bay Area students engineer eggshells into sustainable building material

Building a better Bay Area often requires innovation. Take the case of some Bay Area students who were recent winners at an international biodesign competition -- turning eggshells into architecture.

If you want to cook, you're going to eventually have to break some eggs. But what if you could put those shells to work and help save the planet at the same time?

"So, these are brown eggshells which are actually washed and then baked in the oven. Not too much heat," said Miti Mehta, a design student at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Mehta, along with collaborators Negar Hosseini and Jesus Guillermo Macias Franco, are what you could call eggshell engineers. They're members of a student team that created a winning concept in an international competition known as the Biodesign Challege.

"The whole thing started with, like, our first assignment, where we were just told to make something, like just make something out of waste," Mehta said.

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The team eventually settled on eggshells. And to prove they could be sustainably sourced, the team turned to Plow, a popular Breakfast spot on San Francisco's Potrero Hill, collecting enough donated eggshells to begin hatching a plan. The goal: to turn them into a useful building material, similar to lightweight bricks.

"We figured out why not do them in a similar way as bricks are made right now. So we made some molds out of DPA and PLA with 3D printers," Franco said.

Using the 3D-printed molds, the team turned the material into useful shapes, forming them with a gelatine-like glue also made from renewable sources. Collaborators from UCSF used high-powered microscopes and other instruments to help document the chemical bonding, and the actual strength of the organic materials.

Camille Moore is a graduate student in biochemistry at UCSF.

"It's actually very strong. We did a force test and then compared it to commonly used building materials, and we saw that it was actually comparable," Moore said.

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"So technically, we have a family of four to build our larger scale architecture with," said Negar Hosseini.

The final designs interlock into a modular building system. While the world might not be walking on eggshells anytime soon, the team says the bricks are already strong enough to work as an acoustic filler or as a trim material. And with an almost inexhaustible source, the team believes their eggshell engineering could help provide a bridge into a new era of sustainable, biodesign.

"I am, I like to think of myself as a very urban-oriented kind of architectural designer. So, I would love to see it kind of on a landscape setting, you know, in a park, public park. I'm a father myself, so I would love to see my daughters playing in the park with our material being used in that playground," Franco said.

Besides UCSF, the team also received support from the Autodesk Technology Center in San Francisco.