Every year 13 million new rice lovers are born in China. Today they are already 1,321,851,888 strong. But they not only like to eat rice, they also really like to sink their teeth into building their own home. And that is gradually becoming a problem of Everest-size proportions.
China’s Achilles’ heel is clay. In China a rice field without clay soil is like a secondary road without an electronics superstore in Flanders. The Chinese people’s daily rice is not possible without clay. Just like bricks by the way. And that is the problem: there is not enough clay in China to build houses and plant rice at the same time. How can you solve this problem? Who can make sure that people can build as well as eat?
‘Oh, just ship a few million tons of clay from Italy to China’, you say? Possible, but then on top of all that clay you’ll import a logistical problem of unknown proportions. And the price per brick will probably be a kick in the teeth for half of China.
Enthusiastically you run to the drawing board to immediately invent a new kind of building material? Good too, but by the time the invention hits the market half of China will have starved.
Instead of spending years working on things that aren’t there, it might be better to find a solution with things that are there.
In any case that’s what a Dutch team of engineers with a vision did. They introduced their so-called soft-mud clay press to the Chinese: a machine that makes it possible to make clay from river sludge. Not really anything new – such a technique has been used in our lowlands for hundreds of years – but a really efficient way to get bricks from the tons of river sludge at the bottom of the Yellow River. Result: the farming clay stays where it belongs: on the rice fields. And the 1,321,851,888 Chinese have billions of stones to build with and just as many rice kernels to eat.
This proves that as an engineer you don’t always have to think in terms of revolutionary inventions. That you can make a difference by simply asking yourself what you can do with what already exists. And that that you should look at a problem within the broadest possible context. That’s what we call Beyond Engineering: the art of approaching things as part of an entire ecosystem and not simply from one angle. And above all: the art of finding solutions that don’t create new problems, but make a real difference.
