Many of the earliest of civilizations were near coastlines, where marine shells from oysters and clams were pounded into a paste and mixed with various fillers for use as a mortar in the construction of buildings. This historical perspective from antiquity illustrates how oyster or clam shells were used as the earliest mortar. Dating back to a historical account by Pliny the Younger, who wrote of finding marine shells in the ruins of Pompeii, the city buried by an eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D., that were exposed to the sea water after the lava flows had reached the sea, where the shells had become sticky and cementitious in nature. This process was neither completely understood nor scientifically validated and documented, until ShellBond was awarded its’ patent.
ShellBond’s US Patent describes a method of making a cementitious binder for use in mortars comprising heating marine shell material; allowing the shell material to cool to ambient temperature; mixing water with the cooled shell material; allowing said mixture to spontaneously heat; and monitoring the heat level of said mixture until it commences to cool and as it cools is converted into a dry, substantially white, powdery material that is substantially of the consistency of talcum powder and is useful as a binder in mortar. Moreover, it has been found that the process of can be used with a wider variety of animal skeletal materials than shells thereby markedly expanding the scope of raw materials that can be used in the process.
Tests conducted on the use of ShellBond as a mortar evaluated a series of strength evaluations over 180 days, comparing the ShellBond oyster mortar to Portland cement. The tests were paralleled to compare to ASTM C 207 Type “S” mortar. The results showed that ShellBond mortar achieved 30% higher compression strength than Type “S” mortar.