Past investigations on development of sustainable bricks – A comprehensive review

Abstract

Bricks remain to be an important element in the infrastructure development sector for hundreds of decades. Despite of having a wide variation of manufacturing methods, bricks are well known for their energy intensive firing-based manufacturing process which includes a huge environmental footprint. Several innovative techniques towards producing sustainable bricks and many investigations were attempted to reduce the carbon emission while manufacturing bricks. To understand the growing context of brick manufacturing methods in the past two decades, this paper provides an analysis of recent studies on sustainable development of bricks attempted from the year 2000–2021. The bricks were divided into three categories, namely those that were made from waste incorporation, those that were energy-efficient, and those that were lightweight. Firing is the predominantly preferred brick manufacturing process despite of possessing high-energy demand. All the waste-incorporated bricks were made by adding the waste material merely by partial mass replacing the raw material in the mix matrix. Considering the journey towards sustainability, innovative bricks are required to be produced using appropriate waste materials by developing feasible waste pre-treatment and/or pre-fabrication techniques.

Keywords

• Bricks
• Waste materials
• Energy efficiency
• Light weight
• Sustainability