In a bid to preserve the country's remaining 120 million
hectares of arable land, the government has called for more bricks
to be made from coal dust, cinders and slag, rather than clay.
Speaking at a forum on the sustainable development of brick
production in Beijing on Sunday, Liu Renfu, from the Ministry of
Land and Resources, said China currently has about 90,000 small and
medium-sized brick kilns, which consume more than 1 billion cu m of
clay every year.
The forum was held ahead of the 17th National Land Day, which
fell yesterday, and had the theme of saving land and safeguarding
farming.
Liu was among a group of government officials and experts
calling for an end to the production of clay bricks.
Liu said the annual demand for clay was equivalent to the amount
of earth that could be excavated from a 3-m-deep hole spanning
30,000 hectares - or about the total area of farmland in a
medium-sized county.
As a result, the production of clay bricks poses a serious
threat to farming and the land, and more environmentally friendly
materials, such as slag, cinders and coal dust, should be used, he
said.
Ministry figures show that in recent years, more than 30,000
small-scale brick kilns have been closed down and that bricks made
from environmentally friendly materials now account for 10 percent
of the total, up from 5 percent in the 1990s. Such measures have
helped the country save more than 90,000 hectares of arable land,
Liu said.
However, Liu said that bricks made from coal waste would not be
well received in rural areas, where the demand for building
materials is highest.
"For most rural residents, the new bricks cannot compete with
traditional clay ones on either price and quality," he said.
Some 4 million new homes are built in rural areas every year,
each of which requires about 100,000 bricks, so the demand is huge,
Liu said.
(China Daily June 26, 2007)
