Here in the UK, we suffer from major issues with walls blowing down through wind. As a result, the construction industry is losing more than 35 million bricks per annum. To put this into perspective, this number of bricks would build approximately 3,500 houses. Throughout the industry, we know that these figures will continue to rise in the coming years as the government plans to build another 100,000 houses per annum on top of the already provisioned 189,000.

We emit 26kg’s of CO2 into the atmosphere from heating 60 bricks (1 sqm) in a kiln. And we know that 35.6 million bricks are wasted each year. We would need to produce an additional 31,000 cubic meters of cement to relay those bricks.

This would add a further 7.3 million kg’s of CO2. If you include the embodied carbon, this would give you a total of 57,000 tons of CO2 which is the equivalent to 32,000 diesel cars on the road for a full year.