no...i probably wouldn't live in a house of poop. just me though

As a child I stayed in a wonderful hotel made of cow dung in rural Nepal. Elephant dung is also used in Thailand to make paper, it's mainly grass and straw. We certainly have enough cow poop here, among other varieties! Unfortunately factory farming has made the majority of cow dung in North America toxic... Agricultural reform e.g.: allowing cows to eat grass as nature intended, could coincide with re-using cow dung...

A few years ago I left L.A. and moved to Canada, and shortly thereafter my husband and I got out of the city and started an organic farm. We've been experimenting with a little brick press for the tons of cow manure that quickly accumulate, and will be using it to fuel our woodstoves during the winter. There's no smell once they're dry, and it takes care of the volumes of manure that far exceed our needs as fertilizer.

As the previous poster mentioned, grass-fed, healthy cows are the ideal source, and that is what we have. No worries about toxicity. Later on, we'll take manure from other regional, pasture-based farms and make enough bricks to provide a wood alternative for others who want to keep their heating expenses down. It makes sense, and cleans up an existing problem. We'll need a more sophisticated, higher-volume brick-making machine at that point, but they're readily available.

The bricks can be used instead of firewood in a fireplace, and installing a wood stove in a city home and fuelling it with manure bricks will reduce your dependence on the grid, while addressing the problem of excess manure.

I love seeing the different ways manure can be used--thanks for posting this.

Cow dung is very commonly used in rural India. Mud houses are plastered with it, and it is spread on the ground (keeps ants away). Women always do the spreading with bare hands. I guess considering the cow "holy" takes the ick-its-poop factor away!

it's also used in africa for housing. however i don't think urban dog poop would work ... cow poop is mostly straw/hay.

dog poop is made of meat by-products and i can't see how that would be good to be reused.

Wattle and daub houses are made partly from poop (the daub part). Poo has been used as a building material all over the world (as mentioned above by DrinkMoreWater and Joan in SB) for thousands of years!

I don't think this would ever catch on in the U.S. unless the manufacturers didn't publicize what the bricks were actually made of.

What about the really important aspect of recycling the manure as fertilizer? If the material is bound into bricks, it is removed from the ecological cycles that replenish the soil.

No poop made from carnivores would be safe to use in dried products. That should (ideally, and in my opinion) be composted remotely in a hot compost heap. Unless the compost really gets hot (steaming) the feces contains pathogens, so for home composting, it is rarely safe. ( I only got my home compost to steam once, and it was probably not worth the amount of work it took.)

As to the question asked -- I'd rather not live in a poop house, thanks. But if I lived in a part of the world where that was common, I could probably adapt.

TMI!

But (as Sherry already said) it's such good fertilizer, who would want to make houses out of it? Well, I guess in certain regions like Indonesia, it would be more sensible than clay mining.

But I doubt dog poop would be any good even if it were hot-composted, because my guess is that the fibrous content of cow dung is part of what makes it a good building material. And yes, good points about factory farming... the toxicity of animal manure in the US makes it bad for bricks, compost and just about everything else. The sludge pits at Smithfield are Pepto-Bismol pink because of all the drugs they pump into the pigs. Scary.