Inventions

Fab Brick

Every year globally, the fashion industry creates over 50 million tons of textile waste. It took a young architecture student in 2017 to invent a unique way to upcycle it.

Clarisse Merlet created the amazing “Fab-BRICK,” and started a company that develops decorative and insulative bricks out of old clothes.

The shredded textiles are combined with a custom, rot-proof, eco-friendly glue. The mixture is then compressed into a mold with a hand-operated machine. The colorful bricks are then air-dried for two weeks.

Her award-winning Fab-Bricks are fire-resistant and offer good sound and heat insulation. They are self-locking, stylish and can be stacked easily to create furniture, partitions, and even storage units.

They have good water resistance but aren’t sturdy enough for actual home construction yet… though that is a goal for Merlet.

The entire process is non-polluting and requires no electricity, which makes the system easy to replicate locally—anywhere in the world.

Merlet’s company’s next step is to scale up production to recycle more textile waste in more locations in France and beyond.

Innovative and conscientious, Clarisse Merlet is on the cutting edge of building the future, literally, from remnants of the past.

Go Back to The Stories