A Blog about Better Building Blocks !!!

They say there are only two things that sell these days, and they are ' Computers' and 'Environment'. You have any products related to the computers, may be chips to headphones - well then they do sell. Look at all the computer courses conducted worldwide, or the graduates in Computer Engineering, these facts will definately confirm this statement. And I am not surprised.

But there are so many products today labelled as ECOFRIENDLY, and they are sold!! I am an environmental engineer myself, and all these ECOFRIENDLY business leaves me dumbstruck me as well.

I mean we get anything right from fridges, homes, plastics, bulbs, cars to bricks labelled to be Ecofriendly. And what do they really mean by that?


I am often astounded by the range of products available in market today claiming to be ecofriendly, and this invariably invokes the 'environmental engineer' within me... Not that I buy all of them (because I should also be able to afford it), but I still am curious to know how using these products can help saving the environment...


For example we get something called as ecofriendly plastics. And we are encouraged to used them. First and foremost how can plastic be ecofriendly?? I mean all my life we have read articles asking us to reduce usage of plastics. And then there is a plastic which says its ECOFRIENDLY.

Similarly I recently came across the fundamental of 'Ecofriendly Bricks". And was once again wondering what was that??? I mean how can using a particular kind of brick really make your house ecofriendly?

Well it does. These bricks are made with a certain amount of Fly Ash. For those who didnt know what was that - we have several coal fired power plants across the world, since Thermal Power is still undoubtedly the major power resource globally. There's huge amount of waste generated by burning this coal for power generation, which is called as 'Fly Ash'. Believe in me there is several million tons of fly ash generated across the world, and we dont know what to do with it. Most of this finds its way to the landfills, but thats just a way of storing wastes, not treating it.

Well now researchers have come up with Fly Ash based bricks, where in certain percentage of fly ash is mixed with the clay. This is ofcourse to achieve the ever stringent norms of recommended strength of bricks. Researchers have also tried making bricks with 100 % fly ash, but this is yet to happen.

However these bricks are definately helping us in someway to overcome the mammoth task to handling fly ash. And guess what we have important research, and also production done in India as well. For those interested do visit this site http://www.naldehraindia.com/

So why not build our own houses with something more ecofriendly?