Operation of brick kilns in Bangladesh-a comparative study

This paper presents an investigation on current use of brick kiln technologies in Bangladesh. There are around five thousand established and numerous make-shift brickfields of various capacities all over the country. Most of the kilns in Bangladesh are fixed chimney (FCK) type, which are somewhat old technology and sources of pounding pollutions. Recently the Department of Environment (DoE) of the Bangladesh Government has directed brickfield owners to switch to comparatively better environment friendly technologies like Zigzag, Hybrid Hoffman (HHK) and Vertical Shaft (VSK) kilns. Most of brickfield owners are not familiar with these kilns and thus reluctant to make over due to lack of industrial knowledge and financial support. However few companies have implemented these technologies on pilot-scale and are yet to demonstrate their full financial viability. As such, broad range technical information along with financial analysis of these technologies is presented here. A set of recommendations are prepared in relation to these technologies suited to their investment opportunity, land accessibility, energy and raw-material supply, labour availability and other requirements. Amongst the three technologies, HHK is the most suitable one for large-scale production whereas FCK if modified and converted into Zigzag kiln will be relatively fuel efficient and less polluting. On the other hand VSK, which are comparatively smaller in capacity, can be made popular in rural Bangladesh. The payback periods of these three kilns are 3.14, 3.27 and 2.62 years respectively, whereas CO2 emission potentials are 22.20, 15.86 and 28.54 tCO2e, respectively compared to 38.06 tCO2e for FCK