Life Cycle Assessment of Cementitious and Clay Bricks

Construction is a demanding sector, requiring substantial energy and non-renewable resources. Also, it causes detrimental environmental impact. Amongst all the building materials, traditional fire-burnt clay bricks are used exclusively in many developing countries. Although, significant efforts are put into encouraging the use of alternative bricks (e.g., cementitious bricks, clay bricks enhanced with organic matters, etc.) which are perceived to be viable environmentally and economically but to bring about true recognition of the exact level of effects on natural sphere, environmental offsets are not always quantified but conveyed orally when it comes to using conventional bricks, being largely unaware of the harmful effects it brings during all the stages of manufacture, transportation and installation of the stated product. Past scientific sources covered life cycle assessment of traditional bricks with suitable substitutes along with their comparative analysis. Also, the challenges of obtaining accurate data to conduct the evaluation were focused upon. But most of the previous works did not conduct an expanded examination of clay and other types of bricks by considering many environmental categories. This paper aimed at investigating the life cycle analysis of two 1m∗1m walls made with clay and cement bricks respectively using SIMAPRO software. Seven impact classes were considered to carry out the assessment such as climate change, ozone depletion, terrestrial acidification, freshwater eutrophication, marine eutrophication, human toxicity, and photochemical oxidation. Results showed that utilizing cement bricks in the fabrication of structural members posed lower impact to the environment compared to the wall made with traditional bricks.