18 August 2025
By Wu Xueting
By combining food and clay waste, Jodie Monteiro, an interior design student, created Ferticlay, an organic material four times stronger than regular clay. What new, sustainable possibilities does Ferticlay open up for construction in Singapore, whose rapid urbanisation demands vast amounts of concrete? Jodie shares her journey in exploring the potential of this alternative material.
It started when Jodie wanted to play with clay.
The year was 2021, and Singapore was under lockdown during the pandemic. Struck by an urge to create, Jodie decided to get into pottery. One day, in her uncle’s house, she tried out a recipe she found online to make clay using paper, flour, and salt. She thought it was interesting, but wasteful of new materials that still had use.
When she tossed that clay into some plants in her uncle’s garden, she wondered if she could create clay that could also serve as fertiliser. There were eggshells and used coffee grounds in the house for making natural fertilisers. She crushed them up and integrated them with some clay from the garden.
What began as a casual experiment ended up being the first prototype for ferticlay – aptly named as it is a fertilising clay.
Later, she assessed ferticlay in Singapore Polytechnic’s advanced materials lab, which runs strength and environmental tests on food waste and clay. The best-performing recipe that Jodie would later settle on proved to be four times stronger than pure clay in terms of durability. The waste served as a natural binder, providing nutrients and naturally strengthening the clay.
A 23-year-old interior design student then, Jodie Monteiro had been interested in sustainable materials and conscious of the environmental impact of Singapore’s construction and architecture industries. After turning her project into a business (also named Ferticlay), she looked to expand the applications of clay from pottery homeware to earthen buildings.
In 2024, she joined a course on building houses from clay, straw and sand in Chiang Mai. The organiser, Pun Pun Organic Farm, has been building earthen houses for over twenty years.
“Based on research and historical evidence, such builds can last centuries, but need tender loving care and maintenance,” Jodie said.
Pun Pun does touch-ups when necessary, like after massive floods. Their oldest earthen home is around twenty years old and there have been no issues so far, to Jodie’s knowledge.
If such houses could work in Thailand’s climate, Jodie thought, could they work in Singapore too?
Besides reusing food waste from food establishments, Ferticlay also repurposes excavated waste clay from construction sites that would have otherwise been dumped in a landfill.
Every year, construction projects dig up eight to ten million cubic metres of marine clay during tunnelling and foundation work, whose disposal creates a problem in the land-scarce country.
Singapore has been working to reuse excavated materials from construction sites to reclaim and create new land. In these cases, clay waste is used as filler material in making concrete. Could clay then be scaled to replace concrete entirely, like the earthen houses in Chiang Mai?
Jodie believes it is possible.
Ferticlay offers made-on-demand tiles and bricks crafted from the eponymous clay. However, demand so far has been for decorative projects like installations, rather than practical purposes like walls. As earthen products like ferticlay do not follow Singapore building codes, it is difficult to supply these tiles and bricks in bulk and for heavy-duty usage.
Jodie recognises it would be difficult for ferticlay, or clay in general, to be accepted as a building material industrially.
While Singapore’s early shophouses were built with locally produced clay bricks and roof tiles not unlike Ferticlay’s own products, urbanisation has made the country heavily reliant on concrete. Concrete, the most used man-made material in the world, accounts for up to eight per cent of global carbon emissions during production and requires huge amounts of water and sand, resources that are limited in Singapore.
Clay, on the other hand, is an abundant natural resource. Firing clay for bricks and tiles requires substantial energy, but methods like air-drying, which Ferticlay adopts, can significantly reduce carbon emissions. Ferticlay avoids firing their clay up to 90 per cent of the time. In tropical cities like Singapore, clay tiles can also help keep interiors cooler compared to concrete.
Still, concrete beats out clay in many other factors important to construction companies and homeowners. Manufacturing concrete tiles is faster and less labour intensive, making them cheaper and easier to work with for large-scale construction. While both materials are durable, concrete is stronger in bearing heavy loads, which is crucial for Singapore’s high-rise buildings.
According to Jodie, clay buildings also require more maintenance. For these reasons, she thinks most Singaporeans are not ready for building with clay yet.
“I don’t think a lot of people would be willing to put in the effort to maintain it and to be in it for the long haul,” she said. “We’re very used to convenience.”
People might not be comfortable with the risk of clay buildings not lasting heavy rain, she added. “They buy a house, they want it to be safe.”https://www.eco-business.com/news/khaw-boon-wan-on-recycling-excavated-materials/
The understanding that clay will not replace concrete in Singapore has not stopped Jodie from pushing its limits.
The question she takes on with her team is this: where else does it make sense to inject ferticlay, so that it serves its purpose without compromising safety?
Their answer can be found all over the Ferticlay studio.
In the small, brightly lit room, animal-shaped figurines, bowls, and plant pots crafted from ferticlay adorn the shelves. A ferticlay-painted wall had been reinforced with tapioca starch in place of synthetic polymers traditionally found in wall paints to make the paint stick.
One of Ferticlay’s notable projects was creating a partition wall in a pantry space for a client’s event. As it would be displayed for a short period of time indoors, the team evaluated that a wall made of ferticlay was strong enough to hold. In this case, they reinforced the wall by adjusting the ingredient ratio and the layering of the bricks.
The conditions affecting ferticlay’s durability are conveyed to clients and workshop participants, which include companies, schools, and the public.
Ferticlay products can last at least six months – that’s the fastest one took to start cracking, to Jodie’s knowledge, and it was a heavily watered plant pot. If displayed on a shelf, they can last indefinitely, looking and feeling the same as when they were first made. If handled and used often, though, durability is reduced.
However, their life does not end there. The ferticlay pot can be transferred into a larger pot to release its nutrients into the plant. When placed in soil, ferticlay products start to biodegrade over a few weeks to months, re-integrating into the earth within a year.
Fired clay or ceramics, in contrast, would take centuries to biodegrade naturally.
The circular life cycle of ferticlay is what Jodie hopes her workshop participants can appreciate.
At these workshops, participants learn to make ferticlay and create a clay product of their liking. They could continue creating at home too, by purchasing a DIY Ferti-kit.
In introducing people to ferticlay, Jodie wants to encourage them to look at waste differently, to see their potential for new life.
She hopes that people enjoy creating with their own hands, and through this process, see sustainable practices as something fun and creative rather than an obligation due to anxiety about climate change.
The experience is more valuable than the product. Even though a ferticlay pot might not last long, “it transcends [its own life cycle by] giving life back to the plant and soil,” Jodie said.
As someone who loves crafting, Jodie has long wrestled with the guilt of the waste generated through crafting. Ferticlay was her solution to pursue her passion while minimising environmental damage, and to show others they can do it too.
Jodie believes an experimental mindset is what Singapore lacks in becoming more innovative with sustainability. Many are hesitant to try new things, she noted, especially if it requires a lot of money, time, and effort.
She does not see Singapore moving away from concrete anytime soon, but hopes that big firms try to reuse waste in other ways, like maintaining cores and reusing windows when transforming old buildings into new ones. Different ideas could be explored to find workable solutions.
Her curious nature, along with the freedom of lockdown, pushed Jodie to keep experimenting with different materials for ferticlay and to try running a business that might not end up being financially rewarding.
Many other sustainability start-ups in Singapore have a similar drive for innovation. Jodie finds hope in them. While their actions might seem smaller in scale, together, they make a big collective impact.
She describes them as a community that helps one another towards the common goal of protecting the environment, sharing materials freely, like when Jodie’s friends from a permaculture business gave her some clay from a gardening project.
As for the future of Ferticlay, she is conscious about not losing that drive and joy. Jodie wants to make more partition walls and possibly a bench – but for herself first, at home. While she has ambitions for ferticlay to become more applied as a building material, for now, she enjoys exploring in smaller steps, laying the foundations for that future.
(Edited by Angela Tan)
Ferticlay is a Singapore-based sustainable start-up that turns waste into biodegradable clay suitable for crafting homeware and building materials. They offer customised clay-modelling services and products, and conduct workshops for schools, companies, and the public. Based in Ferticlay Studios, 3A Pasir Ris Drive 6 #02-28, Singapore, 519422, you can reach out to them on Instagram or their website.
Xueting is a writer living in Singapore. An English literature graduate, she has worked as a journalist, book editor, and copywriter. She enjoys telling stories that connect people and learning more about sustainable living.
Southeast Asia’s Environmental Media Community
© 2025 EcoCupid all rights reserved.