Huge consumption of clay brick in Asia.
Brick production is a very large and very traditional industry in many parts of Asia. It is a booming industry
as the demand for bricks is increasing almost universally due to fast economic growth, urbanisation and prosperity.
Sta?tistically, every Asian citizen consumes some 250 bricks per year, though the usage patterns vary :
consumption s higher in fast-developing urban areas, and there is also a strong trend towards using bricks for
improving rural houses. The most common dream of poor people is to replace their mud houses with solid building
materials, and as they may not have the money to build their house in one go, they do it ‘ brick by brick ‘. In
Bangladesh and the river plains of North India, where no stone is found, large amounts of bricks are used to make
gravel for the substructure of roads or as an aggregate in concrete.
Over 1,000 billion bricks are produced and consumed in Asia per year, an almost unimaginable ?gure. It is the
equivalent size of 100,000 New York Empire State Build?ings, and the corresponding surface area would be 10 times
the present area of Manhattan. This unbelievable amount of built-up area is being created in Asia year upon year.