Bricks from Industry Wastes for Sustainable Development

Abstract In the past few decades, there has been rapid exploitation of natural materials from the construction industry all over the globe. For the manufacturing of bricks, lake beds are being encroached on and exploited for clay mining. Industrial wastes like Ground Granulated Blast Furnace Slag (GGBS), Red Mud, and Marble powder are not being managed and used efficiently. Making newer products from these wastes will help reduce the environmental hazards and demand for natural resources which encourages sustainable development. Marble has been used in the construction field for a long time as a flooring or cladding material but not as a constituent material of brick. A few research works have been reported to use marble powder as an alternative material in the manufacturing of bricks. In this paper, innovative bricks were prepared using these three industrial wastes (GGBS, Red Mud, and Marble powder) in different proportions. In this study, bricks were manufactured with varied marble powder proportions along with red mud and GGBS. The bricks of size 210mm X 110mm X 70mm were prepared and burnt at 600⁰C and investigated their properties under burnt and unburnt conditions as per IS code provisions. The experimental results reveal that the compressive strength and density of fired and unfired bricks decreases with the increase of marble powder proportion and the optimum percentage of marble powder is 30% can be used to manufacture the bricks of class A or B according to IS codes. It is noticed that the compressive strength varies from 2.84 Mpa to 7.9 MPa and density decreases from 2121.5 kg/m³ to 1578.2 kg/m³ for burnt bricks. For unfired clay bricks, it varied from 1.5 Mpa to 4.11 Mpa. And density 2157.9 kg/m³ to 1635.2 kg/m³.