Brick: sustainability through policy

Priya Joseph

Urban Research & Practice, 2021, vol. 14, issue 2, 201-211

Abstract: The brick has become a remarkable political symbol with the laying of the silver brick in Ayodhya, India, recently. A tangible material in this whole exercise; the humble, everyday ‘brick’became the symbol of nationalism. While this building material holds such a shiny political campaign in the form of a silver brick today, the on-ground situation of brick kilns is rather grim, which exploits labour and deteriorates the environment. To change this scenario there needs to be change in policy that includes an array of solutions for brick making, including Stabilised Compressed Earth Blocks, adobe etc. To keep a check on these ecological imbalances, firstly at policy level intervention, the government should initiate decentralised, smaller and regional production systems instead of global chains. Secondly, alternate construction materials should be made mainstream, and an array of innovative local technologies should be incorporated instead of propagating one chief solution, universally, for brick production. Absence of environmental emission policies and regulatory enforcement leave no incentive for brick manufacturers to adopt less polluting industries and the added lack of policies that address the demand-side issues, even though appropriate technologies may be present, make it worse. There is an urgent need to revamp the brick industry of the world, especially in the emerging economies where the next decades will see exponential growth.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17535069.2020.1819724 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rurpxx:v:14:y:2021:i:2:p:201-211

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rurp20

DOI: 10.1080/17535069.2020.1819724

Access Statistics for this article

Urban Research & Practice is currently edited by Professor Rob Atkinson

More articles in Urban Research & Practice from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().