Corobrik managing director, Dirk Meyer, answers some 'green' questions.
What is classified as a green material?
‘Green’ in building material terms is relative, with greenness being referenced from two perspectives:
- Whether the building material is composed of renewable rather than non-renewable resources, and
- Impacts of the building material over the life of the product.
Non-renewable fuel resources are typically used in the manufacture of fired clay bricks which, therefore, may not be considered green from that perspective. On the other hand, clay from which clay bricks are made is a bountiful, fallow resource being put to a useful long-term purpose, this purpose being achieved with low lifecycle impacts on the environment.
Notably, clay brick is an inert material, benign in character, ensuring a low impact relationship with the environment. It does not release any volatile organic compounds to impact negatively on the quality of the air we breathe and the maintenance-free qualities of clay face bricks, which incur no future carbon debt over the product’s lifecycle, may be seen as another green quality.
What is Corobrik doing in the greening space?
As a business, we have been addressing green or environmental issues for many years. As with all businesses, global warming and the prevailing debate on solutions to global warming have raised the ante for better understanding one’s business and the impact it has on the environment in carbon footprint terms. To this end Corobrik, a long time back, commissioned research with the CSIR’s Built Environment unit and other professional organisations to better understand its carbon footprint and what we need to do better and more of to reduce our carbon footprint and enhance the environmental integrity of the business.
What would Corobrik define as sound environmental practice?
With clay brick manufacture, Corobrik defines sound environmental practice as:
- Quarrying and manufacturing operations being undertaken beyond just the parameters and requirements of Environmental Management Plans for each quarry and manufacturing process;
- Concurrent rehabilitation of all quarries taking place during annual quarrying operations to ensure future rehabilitation liabilities are kept to a minimum;
- Environmental Management Plans for each quarry that provide for final rehabilitation and re-use as farmland, a nature reserve around a pollution-free dam, recreational facilities and/or sites for commercial and residential development;
- The use of continuous kiln technologies to ensure the most efficient use of energy through the drying and firing processes;
- Systematic attention to lowering electrical power usage throughout the production process;
- The wider use of cleaner-burning fuels such as natural gas that halves the CO₂ emissions when compared to coal fuel;
- “Dematerialization” interventions, where one succeeds in making the “same” brick product of less material yet with equal or more product attributes and with lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Sustainability – how does Corobrik contribute to this factor?
Quite simply Corobrik embraces a future that is environmentally sustainable and to be successful in South Africa’s developmental context considers it important to pursue a holistic approach that considers the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainability.
Everything we have done to “green the business”, or plan to do, should be economically viable and valuable to broader society in some way. Our move to natural gas for firing our kilns presents a good example.
If one looks at the cost of natural gas, it is higher than for other firing fuels. So, if one just looked at the fuel element of the production process it has the propensity to make the products uncompetitive and might have been discarded as an option.
However, when one considers the higher fuel cost together with the social and environmental benefits, a different cost-benefit picture emerges. Natural gas has provided a variety of other benefits which include:
- A cleaner atmosphere
- Reduced dust levels
- A healthier work environment
- Greater control of the firing process
- Higher product yields of first grade products
- Greater employee productivity.
Hence the decision to use natural gas more widely as a firing fuel has enabled Corobrik, in the face of an increasingly discerning, environmentally sensitive market, to achieve its objective of producing bricks of the highest quality consistency and the lowest possible carbon footprint for the technologies employed.
This in turn supports the sustainability of Corobrik’s business into the future.
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