SA Affordable Housing November - December 2018 // Issue: 73 | Page 14

ASSOCIATIONS
Promoting a more
sustainable industry
The move to make the clay brick industry increasingly sustainable has taken
another step up with the development of a project designed to mitigate
climate change, and ecological damage caused by the industry.
F
or more than a decade the Clay Brick Association of
South Africa (CBA) has been actively working on ensuring
the industry is not only the country’s most diverse rural
employer, but that it is sustainable end energy efficient.
Following two recent projects the Vertical Shaft Brick Kiln
Project (VSBK) that ran from 2009 to 2013 and the Energy
Efficient Clay Brick Project (EECB) that ran between 2013 and
2017, the CBA is now in the process of implementing a new
overarching project for the promotion of sustainable
practices in the clay brick sector. The project builds on the
experience gained from the VSBK and EECB project and is
A housing project in Christiana - North West.
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NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2018
co-funded by the European Union and will run from January
2018 to December 2020.
The overall objective is to promote inclusive sustainable
practices for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in
the South African clay brick sector, and will be executed by
means of four work packages (WPs) aimed at ‘empowering
sector participants towards the transformation to more
sustainable product practices’, ‘to promote sustainable
building practices’, ‘to realise sector-based sustainability
monitoring and reporting’ and to encourage ‘SCP awareness
of the informal or small-scale brick-making sector’.
The projects will look at a series of separate, but
interlinked, issues in the industry with a goal to
refining each integrated aspect. It aims to reduce
GHG emissions, reduce energy consumption,
monitor and manage air pollution, reduce the use of
water and the quantity of waste generated during
production, to use natural resources in an efficient
manner, minimise the impact on communities and
wildlife, to facilitate equal employee development
across race and gender and to continually ensure
development across the whole sector regarding
sustainability.
“The combined project team of the CBA, EM and PfI
brings a set of diverse and combined skills to the
project that enables them to executed the project in
an efficient and effective manner and by doing so
assist in moving the clay brick sector to be even more
sustainable going into the next decade,” says Mariana
Lamont, executive director of the CBA.
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