Black carbon and other pollutants from brickfields country-wise: Impact assessment and policy guidance under welfare analysis

Abstract

The brick industry in developing world is a vast, coal burning and polluting industry. Nearly 1,500 billion bricks are produced globally each year where 87% are from Asia. China dominates the world in producing bricks using coal combustion and woods as fuels where Australia placed the last. Bangladesh placed the 5th in the world, and it mostly uses woods as fuels. These industries are owned privately. It is a type of industry that is mostly driven with business mentality without emphasizing the hygiene and health aspects where government laws are barely active in practices where rapid urbanization has been increasing demand of bricks. But, in most cases, this industry uses inefficient and dirty technology that causes environmental externalities. Brick-kilns inject huge volume of effluent gases. It causes depletion of atmospheric O2 level. Addressing the issue for policy guidance, this study first analyzes the consequences of these externalities in terms of marginal damage (MD) under neoclassical partial equilibrium demand & supply theory. It further analyzes the reasons of disparity between social-cost and private-cost by conventional marginal damage analysis. Findings show that due to gases emission from brickfields, the marginal social-costs are higher than marginal private-cost. In this economic dilemma, brick-kilns are benefiting with the expense of human-society country-wise. As it has been going on, the rises of brick-prices have been causing upward trends of welfare losses where producer surplus is dominating the total surplus. This consequential economic situation has been causing higher deadweight loss year after year. The reason is that the bricks-customers distribute this expenditure away from now more expensive bricks. Now there is an urgency for national policy actions for ensuring cleaner & sustainable brick production. On this aspect, reforestation efforts can be achieved in multi-faucets including brickfields’ charity and govt. policies on planting trees and for motivational efforts inspiring citizens of this country. These motivational efforts can be in multi-faucets: (a) inspiring “birthday celebration by planting trees”, (b) forcing to use green Tech in brick kilns and (c) conducting research in both phases of govt. and academicians where financial supports can be inspirational.