Constructing Disaster: The International Brick Trade, Carbon Emissions and Climate Change Impacts

Brick workers at a Bangladeshi Brick Kiln. Photo: Tamim Billah

We are living, for the first time in history, in an urban world. By 2008, more than half of the world’s population was living in towns and cities: a development with profound implications for sustainability. Urban areas and their construction are increasingly recognised as major contributors to climate change, with the built environment currently responsible for 39% of carbon emissions worldwide. Yet what makes this is a difficult issue to tackle is the diversity of processes that contribute to it. Eleven percent of global energy emissions are linked to the construction process, whilst an even higher proportion of emissions are linked to material manufacturing. One fifth of global black carbon is attributable to brick kilns alone, 90% of which are in central Asia.

As such, both the impact of the built environment and responsibility for it are becoming increasingly geographically complex. By 2050, "embodied carbon" – carbon emissions released whilst producing, transporting and erecting building materials – is set to account for half of the carbon footprint of construction. The proportion of construction materials sourced domestically is declining, as global Northern nations “outsource” the production of raw materials. Over the last 40 years, global material use has tripled, a third of which is now traded across international borders.

Brick smoke billows over former rice fields in Bangladesh. Photo: Tamim Billah

Material mobility of this sort casts the climate policy of numerous countries, not least the UK, in an unfavourable light. As the UK economy transitions ever further from manufacturing, the nation’s own urban infrastructure is becoming ever more prone to carbon embodied in the burgeoning global trade in materials. Having exceeded its capacity to produce bricks domestically, for example, the UK’s response to its looming ‘housing crisis’ has left domestic brick production insufficient to meet demand, leaving the UK facing a 'brick deficit' of more than half a billion bricks per year. The result has been a rise in brick imports to more than 400 million per year, predominantly from the European Union but increasingly from outside Europe. The UK now imports 7% of its total brick stock, the highest proportion in the world.

This is cause for significant concern with regard to the emissions embodied in UK construction. In particular, the transportation costs associated with importing heavy, high volume materials such as bricks, ensures that they are associated with a considerably higher volume of CO2 emission than those produced domestically. Yet the trend in brick imports is towards sourcing from further and further afield. The historical dominance of the UK’s nearest trading partners, Belgium and the Netherlands – which supplied 58% and 32% of EU brick imports respectively in the last 5 years – is fading, whilst a growing proportion of bricks are now arriving in the UK from global South producers such as India, China, Pakistan and Turkey. With a 59% year on year growth in non-EU bricks, current trends evident in HMRC data suggest that non-EU bricks will surpass EU produced bricks in under 5 years – a trend that Brexit is expected to exacerbate. The far greater distances involved in transporting bricks from major non-EU exporting countries means that the carbon emissions embodied in brick imports from these non-EU sources are several times higher than those produced domestically.

Moreover, the local environmental impacts of bricks produced in many non-EU sources is enormous. Brick kilns are recognized as one of the largest stationary sources of black carbon and are ‘stringently’ regulated by Defra within the UK’s borders, yet remain the top air polluter in numerous other South Asian brick exporters. In addition to the carbon implications, air pollution from brick factories affects both humans and crops, whilst mass clay harvesting contributes to poor farming yields and local disasters such as flooding in many brick belt countries. Nevertheless, the lack of legal coverage for imported materials exemplifies how bulk imports of this sort fall through the cracks of environmental governance. Though an issue of cross-cutting relevance to multiple government and non-government agencies, the international, displaced nature of the environmental impact dislocates it beyond the reach of regulation, essentially rendering them invisible in the environmental accounting of urbanisation.

Young brick workers shovel brick ash in Bangladesh. Photo: Tamim Billah

Human impacts, similarly, are hidden by a system which asks few questions of the provenance of most materials. The growing trade in non-EU bricks is associated with key humanitarian and socioeconomic issues, dangerous working conditions, indentured labour, child labour and modern slavery. Bricks produced in the “brick belt” of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – all key importers to the UK – are frequently made in dirty, dangerous and often degrading conditions. Many labourers are debt bonded, made to work – alongside their families in many cases – in unhealthy and sometimes lethal conditions to pay off interest on long term debts accrued outside of the kiln. Yet despite clear evidence of the role of UK trade in supporting and funding these practices, the failure of national carbon accounting methods to connect investments made in global Southern producers with the humanitarian, environmental and climate change commitments made by the UK itself, leaves little opportunity to hold companies accountable for the impacts and emissions associated with trade.

Rather than ensuring meaningful environmental progress therefore, the domestic accounting of emissions and local environmental targets ultimately serves to undermine their efficacy by incentivising the exporting of emissions and pollution overseas. Referred to as ‘displacement’, or ‘carbon leakage’, this is a phenomenon that has been recorded both within multi-national companies and industries more broadly. Yet, though widespread, it represents a major obstacle to the efficacy of environmental regulation, not only facilitating but indirectly encouraging the removal of pollutants, and dangerous or exploitative labour practices overseas. These practices both direct and intensify the impacts of economic precarity and climate-linked disasters such as floods and droughts, leaving the mark of British trade in the landscapes that supply its materials and the environmental and human abuses that occur there. Without substantial regulatory changes, British trade will soon play a growing role in constructing these disasters overseas, whilst British cities will be increasingly be built on them.