INTRODUCTION

          While taking the building materials, brick remains one of the most important building material in India. Notably the Indian brick industry, which is the second largest producer in the world, next only to china, has more than 1,00,000 operating units, producing about 140 billion bricks annually. The industry has an annual turnover more than Rs.140 billion. And it is one of the largest employment-generating industries employing millions of workers.

          The conventional brick making is an energy intensive process. In India fuel cost alone account for almost 30 - 40% of the production cost. The conventional brick making practice consumes huge quantities of fuel in terms of coal, firewood, and other biomass fuel. It is estimated that the Indian brick industry consumes more than 24 million tones of coal annually, in addition to several million tones of biomass fuels. Kilns are also nutrious as highly polluting establishments, affecting not just flora, fauna, but also posing threats to human health.

          In this project, the above problems were solved by introducing an alternative, cost effective, eco-friendly innovative building bricks. These alternative bricks were made with papercrete. Papercrete is a tricky term. The name seems to imply a mix of Paper and concrete, hence Papercrete. Different types of Papercrete contain 50 – 80 % of waste paper. Papercrete additives can be Portland cement, sand, fly ash.

In this project sand, cement, and waste materials like paper, fly ash, were mixed in various proportions and a suitable proportion which gave more strength, less cost, inflammable, less water absorbance and more eco friendly was found out. And the character of that successive proportions were analysed in this project.