Bangladesh brick industry tries to clean up its act

• Bangladesh closing clay brick kilns to protect environment
• Preferred materials like concrete blocks scarcely meet demand
• Cost of transition to blocks or advanced kilns bars progress

NARAYANGANJ, Bangladesh - Across Bangladesh, clay-fired kilns for brick making send filth into the air, spew toxic gasses and use up topsoil that could be producing food.

To clean the air and meet environmental goals, the government has been closing the polluting kilns, but the adoption of cleaner alternatives is badly lagging, industry insiders say.

Cleaner alternatives include automated, energy-efficient brick-making technology or the production of concrete blocks, increasingly being adopted by other Asian countries like China and Vietnam.

The government environment agency in Bangladesh has shut more than 600 kilns, while 3,500 of the country's 8,000 kilns are designated for closure, according to official figures.

The shutdowns began with kilns that lacked proper documents to operate.

Many were set up near villages, schools or forests in violation of government rules, Syeda Rizwana Hasan, the country's environment adviser, told Context.

"This is about switching to alternative materials that other countries have already adopted," Hasan said.

Manufacturing clay bricks mostly runs on burning coal, generating greenhouse gases and particulate matter that harm human health, and uses topsoil that is critically needed for growing crops in the densely populated country.

Over the last 15 years, Bangladesh has attempted to move to cleaner alternatives such as less-polluting kilns, but the effort is held up by cost considerations.

With government encouragement, brick kiln owners converted many long-necked fixed-chimney kilns to zigzag kilns that make better use of energy and emit fewer toxic gases.

Development organisations have been pushing for more energy-efficient technologies as well such as hybrid Hoffman kilns (HHK), which capture and use their own waste heat to halve energy usage.

The large initial investment costs of $2 million for each HHK kiln, however, is about 15 times the cost of making a zigzag kiln, slowing their large-scale adoption, according to the World Bank.  

Under Bangladesh's air quality management plan, the government is tasked with shifting away from clay-fired bricks to concrete blocks in its construction projects.

Blocks too have a significant environmental footprint as they require carbon-emitting cement, but they would save agricultural topsoil, said Hasan.

In 2019, the government had planned to phase out clay brick kilns altogether and use 100% concrete blocks in public constructions by 2025, a widely missed target.

A lack of availability of concrete blocks in the market has been the biggest barrier, said a 2023 study by researchers from the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD).   

Concrete block availability currently meets less than 10% of market needs, according to members of the Bangladesh building industry.

Shut down or fix

This year, the government campaign against illegal brick kilns has been intense, but fining and shutting down kilns is neither new nor particularly effective, said brick producers.

Brick kilns are banned near residential neighbourhoods and natural areas like forests and mountains, but many kilns are set up in such areas without approval from local authorities.

The ban does not work as kiln owners pay the fines and absorb shutdown losses to wait for the right time to restart operations or set up a new kiln elsewhere, according to insiders.

At the same time, the high cost of setting up a concrete block factory is beyond the reach of most brick makers, said Moogdho Mahzab, a development economist and associate research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

"Right now, local, informal brick makers are more well-adapted to the market compared to large, formal concrete block factories," he said.  

In rural Bangladesh, when families see their income grow, their priority is to build a brick house, and local brick makers readily meet this vast demand from the small buyers, Mahzab said.  

The construction sector is expected to grow by more than 6% in the next four years after a brief lull, and the number of brick kilns has been increasing in recent years in keeping with rising demand.   

Abdur Rouf has been manufacturing bricks for roughly two decades in the Baktabali region of the Narayanganj district, where 800 workers produce six million bricks in his kiln during the annual dry season from November to June.

"No matter what they say, right now you cannot meet the massive market demand for bricks with concrete blocks," Rouf said.

In Baktabali, several dozens of similar kilns are lined up along the banks of the River Dhaleswari.

As brick makers cannot easily afford to switch to advanced kilns or concrete blocks, some intermediate solutions could help solve environmental concerns, said Nina Brooks, an assistant professor of global health at Boston University in the United States.

Instead of shutting down the existing kilns altogether, fixes like training workers to stack and fire bricks more efficiently and using powdered biomass fuel could cut emissions of greenhouse gases and particulate matter by 20%, said a Science article Brooks co-authored.

"The ultimate solution is not known yet - but it is important to work with brick kiln owners to accelerate change that can reduce pollution and protect public health," she wrote.

($1 = 122.4000 taka)

(Reporting by Md. Tahmid Zami; Editing by Jack Graham and Ellen Wulfhorst.)