An Environmental Make-Over for an Ancient Egyptian Industry
Since pharaonic times, mud bricks have been Egypt’s primary building material, and brick making has changed very little over the last few centuries. The industry still uses a crude methodology: barrels filled with mazot, a heavy oil left over after more valuable fuel products have been extracted from crude oil, are placed on top of blazing hot kilns with a pipe extending down into a stack of bricks. The mazot drips out of the pipe, and is then lit, cooking the bricks.
Factories that burn mazot are among the worst polluters in Cairo, a city of 18 million residents where the average Cairene ingests more than 20 times the acceptable level of air pollution, akin to smoking 20 cigarettes a day.
There are, however, signs of hope. An enterprising group of Canadian businessmen and Egyptian mud brick factory owners is switching from the heavy oil to natural gas, dramatically reducing pollution and the carbon emissions of the factories, at a profit. The efficiencies allowed owners to recover the cost of switching to gas within a year and continue with an annual saving of about 20,000 dollars. Furthermore, the gas process creates a much higher quality brick than the mazot fired brick.
Air quality in the surrounding environment has also improved substantially. Each brick factory conversion is expected to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 37 percent — or 2,000 tonnes — per year. Having 50 factories running on gas is the equivalent saving of getting 300,000 cars off the road in Cairo — a city of three million cars.
What started as a development project has now evolved into a privately funded business venture run by Idea Egypt with Canadian investment. Currently 311 factories are slated to make the conversion, which will reduce carbon emissions to the equivalent of taking almost 1.9 million cars off roads in the Egyptian capital.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39730
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