SOUTH ASIA’S brick sector needs to retrofit its existing kilns with cleaner and more efficient technology, a workshop in Kathmandu last month heard. Organised by the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, Mexico’s National Institute of Ecology, and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development in Nepal, the workshop was attended by entrepreneurs from Latin America, Africa and Asia. South Asia produces over 250 billion bricks annually compared to China’s production of one trillion bricks. But South Asia’s outdated clamp kilns, moveable bull trench kilns and fixed chimney kilns are inefficient, polluting and labour-unfriendly. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, brick-making is the second largest industrial consumer of coal in India and accounts for nine per cent of industrial black carbon emissions that have been traced to global warming. South Asia’s “brick industry is where it was in the 1800s,” said Gilbert Habla, managing director of the Melbourne-based Habla Kilns which has signed an agreement with the Nepalese company MinEnergy to build the first Habla ‘zig-zag kiln’ in a developing country. Retrofitting with Habla kilns is seen as a first step in South Asia’s climb up the technology ladder. Doing so could result in a 20 per cent drop in coal consumption, three-quarter reduction in black carbon emissions, and profit-doubling, according to a 2013 study by the India-based Greentech Knowledge Solutions. Introduction of advanced, highly-mechanised technologies — like the hybrid Hoffman kilns in Bangladesh — have proven messy because of a lack of technical knowhow among entrepreneurs, says Bhishma Pandit, energy efficiency expert at the consultant group INTEGRATION GmbH. “Extension services through which you can deliver the technology are almost non-existent in the entire South Asian region, and there are no training facilities,” said Sameer Maithel, director at Greentech. “Engaging policymakers remains a big issue.” Without limits on emissions and proper working conditions, entrepreneurs have little incentive to change, which could mean that plans to retrofit older kilns will fail, says Pandit. “If a brick entrepreneur can make 40,000 bricks with US$ 11,400 as investment and no one is stopping him, he will not invest US$ 114,000 to produce the same number of bricks,” Pandit said. (SciDev)
India’s neutrino project sparks fresh debate
EXCHANGES BETWEEN scientists building the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) in southern India’s Western Ghats and critics of the project have revived controversy regarding selection of the site — a seismic zone that is also among the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biological diversity. In April, a group of 22 scientists published in Current Science, published by the Indian Academy of Science, a response to an opinion piece that had appeared in the same journal in February suggesting that tunnelling for the project could trigger quakes in the UNESCO world heritage site. “Tunnelling is a routine activity in mountains, under the rivers and seas, and even under mega cities for metro rail transportation, ” the scientists, drawn from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, and other top institutions, said in their response. “It is hard to believe that such an activity can cause major or even minor earthquakes.” The scientists also refuted charges levelled by the authors of the opinion piece, V.T. Padmanabhan and Joseph Makkolil that no geotechnical study had been carried out at the site chosen for the INO project. When complete, the INO will be the biggest underground particle physics laboratory in the world, dwarfing the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. The INO will house a 50,000 tonne magnetised-iron neutrino detector. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that hold no electrical charge, travel at the speed of light and have a small amount of mass, the determination of which is an important open problem in physics. According to Padmanabhan, a member of the European Commission on Radiation Risk, it is noteworthy that the area around the INO site is prone to hydro-seismicity and has several dams constructed close by. “Removal of 800,000 tonnes of dense rock for mountain-tunnelling, using an estimated 100,000 kilograms of gelatin may induce earthquakes,” Padmanabhan said. Makkolil, scientist at the Inter-University Centre for Nano Materials and Devices, Cochin University of Science and Technology, said the construction of Gran Sasso, three decades ago, has been linked to floods, damage to an aquifer, tremors and a major earthquake in 2009. The opinion piece centred around the experience of mountain-tunnelling, aquifers and tectonics at the Gran Sasso lab and its implications for the INO. AM Vinodkumar, physics professor at Calicut University, project associate and signatory to the response, told SciDev.Net that the project posed no danger to the Western Ghats, but would immensely help India build capacity in studying neutrinos and particle physics. (SciDev)
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