What Would It Take to Reduce Air Pollution from Brick Manufacturing across South Asia?

What Would It Take is a podcast from Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) that features conversations with problem-solving change agents committed to putting social science to work for society. 

This transcript features Stephen Luby of Stanford School of Medicine and SIL’s Kate Green Tripp discussing the question What Would It Take to Reduce Air Pollution from Brick Manufacturing across South Asia?

We invite you to listen to the episode or read the transcript below.

Season 2, Episode 2: Transcript

Kate Green Tripp: Welcome to What Would It Take? A podcast from Stanford Impact Labs designed to expose and explore what it looks like to tackle social problems with a solutions focused orientation. I'm your host, Kate Green Tripp. Today, I'm joined by Stanford epidemiologist doctor Stephen Luby. Steve is a physician, a researcher and an educator on a mission to reduce air pollution in Bangladesh and ultimately throughout South Asia.

His research team, which stretches across universities, civic organizations and environmental advisory firms, is specifically focused on the pollution caused by coal burning brick kilns. The team's aim? To not only improve health outcomes by decreasing air pollution, but to do it in a way that takes into account the high demand for bricks across the region. They developed a low cost intervention for operators of traditional Zig-Zag kilns, which dominate the brick industry in Bangladesh, and then conducted a randomized controlled trial of the intervention, which we'll talk about today.

When you hear Steve mention PM 2.5, he's speaking about a type of airborne particulate matter which the World Health Organization confirms is associated with the greatest proportion of adverse health effects related to air pollution. To learn more about Steve's research, please visit the link in our show notes.

So, Steve, I'm holding a copy of the journal Science from a number of weeks ago and the cover story on this particular issue is called Better Bricks. And it's all about your team's work, figuring out what it takes to reduce emissions and pollution from informal kilns in South Asia, particularly Bangladesh. And I'd love for those who've not yet read this for you to give us a brief overview of what you found.

Stephen Luby: What we found is that when we deployed a simple intervention to train kiln owners and managers in how to better operate their kilns, fully 65% of them took up this intervention. And those that took up the intervention saved 23% of their coal costs. They were able to produce the same amount of bricks with 23% less coal, which then also meant less air pollution and less carbon dioxide emission.

So the kilns that adopted the intervention were able to produce their bricks using 23% less coal. So they saved money but by burning 23% less coal, they also generated about 20% less small particulate emissions and about 20% less carbon dioxide. So they spent less money on coal, and we ended up with less air pollution and less CO2. Because they saved money, they were really motivated to continue to use the intervention. So over 99% of kilns who use it in one year continue to use the improved processes in the future years.

Kate: That's incredible. By developing an intervention that is business friendly–it sounds as if that's the correct language–you're seeing it be adopted far more readily.

Stephen: Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. I mean, I contrast this with like all the years that I worked trying to promote handwashing and the difficulty we have in this kind of behavior change. If you really understand the business environment and figure out, well, wait a minute, what can we do that would actually both help business owners and help society?

And that requires some creativity to come around to get to. But then you have a recipe that you can really work with your stakeholders and really work to scale.

Kate: Steve, I'd love to understand you and your perspective as an epidemiologist in terms of how you came to this particular problem.

Stephen: Well, Kate, I was living in Bangladesh. I was actually the CDC country director for Bangladesh and working on emerging infections, and we were setting up surveillance for influenza. And we care about the strains of influenza that are circulating, because what happens in Bangladesh will eventually circulate in other places. So as we were setting up this surveillance, one of my colleagues suggested, well, why don't you look for particulate matter for air pollution in these homes, that there are inexpensive modified smoke detectors that can be used to measure particulate matter.

So we said, okay, we've hung those in the rooms where these children that were under surveillance slept. And what we found was that there was a direct association between the occurrence of pneumonia in these children and their exposure to particulate matter in the air. And this matters a lot, because pneumonia is the leading cause of death among children in Bangladesh and the leading cause of death among children globally.

And then we said, well, where is all this particulate matter coming from? And people thought, oh, it'll be the cookstoves. No, the biggest determinant of indoor air pollution was outdoor air pollution. And then as we started to dig into that, we found, to my complete surprise, that during the winter time when air pollution is worse, 40% of the air pollution, 40% of the PM 2.5 was coming from a single source: brick kilns.

And so from a epidemiology, from a public health perspective, if you have a single source creating that much of a problem, it's very attractive to work to develop an intervention on. And there weren't people working in that field, so we thought it was an important thing to pursue.

Kate: So I'd love for you to paint a picture just to help understand when we talk about brick kilns, what size of industry are we talking about?

Stephen: Well, these don't look at all like brick kilns, a lot like in the U.S. or Europe, which are big, large operations run by multinational firms. These are traditional kilns. And so there are 7000 of these across Bangladesh. So this is not a big centralized operation. They're not just like backyard firing kilns like artists might be used to in terms of making clay sculpture, because you have to bake a lot of bricks, but they're about the size of a soccer pitch, and kilns are loaded with bricks.

And by staff, you usually have about 100 people working there, and they're generating on the order of 20 million bricks a year or so. But it's a seasonal business. They only operate during the dry season. When it's raining, it would rain on the bricks and rain on the kilns, and it's not a condition under which you could use a traditional kiln.

Kate: And as I understand it, bricks are a needed resource and there is no sign of slowing when it comes to the need for that resource.

Stephen: Now, that's exactly right. I mean, bricks are the primary building material across all of South Asia, and they've been using bricks to make their homes and make their buildings literally for millennia. And so it's a technology that's very well known. It is the most common building material, for example, in many of these places, like Bangladesh, there is no limestone that you can get at.

So any concrete has to be imported. And so bricks just tend to be front and center. And because the populations across South Asia are young, the demand for buildings is growing. So as many bricks as we see being burnt now, there are even more of these expected in the coming decades.

Kate: So as you came to understand this single source cause, who did you begin working with to tackle the problem of the degree of pollution created by the brick manufacturing industry?

Stephen: Yeah, we really started from a position of profound ignorance. I really paid attention in medical school, and not once did they mention brick kilns. And it's a little embarrassing. I mean, I lived in the country and we would drive by the kilns, we'd see the air pollution. But I never had really connected that air pollution with health until the study demonstrated this problem.

So in those settings where I don't know what's going on, I find it really helpful to begin with qualitative research with anthropologists. And so part of my position with the Centers for Disease Control, I was also seconded into a local research institution in Bangladesh, icddr,b, the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research in Bangladesh. So I had a large team of anthropologists that were already working with me on many communicable disease issues, and I felt that we just didn't understand the brick industry at all.

So what we did is Debashish Biswas, an anthropologist in that group, led a team of anthropologists to talk to everybody who we could identify as stakeholders. So we wanted to talk to the people who made bricks. We wanted to talk to the people who bought bricks. We wanted to talk to the farmers who sold their soil to make the bricks.

We wanted to talk to employees who worked on the kilns. We wanted to talk to folks who built buildings. We talked with the World Bank. We wanted to talk to folks in government, those involved in regulating. So we wanted to basically talk to all of the stakeholders to try to understand the broader system and why people acted the way they did.

What were their motivations? What was it that created this system, that we made bricks the way we do in South Asia?

Kate: When it came to understanding the problem and identifying who you needed to work with to build a solution, who emerged as your key partners?

Stephen: Yeah. So clearly icddr,b was a central partner because they put in the effort. Part of anthropology is developing rapport. And the brick kiln owners had always been marginalized. The head of the Bangladesh Brick Manufacturer Owners Association, when I first met him, his first request was I would like you to work with us so people stop hating us. And anthropology is all about reaching out to marginalized populations and giving them voice and understanding.

So I would just really emphasize how important it was to develop a trusting relationship. And now when you look at what we have been able to accomplish, so much of it has been because the Brick Kiln Owners Association and the individual brick kiln owners consider us honest brokers. We're interested in their perspective, and our game is not vilification of them as polluters.

So I would say that was number one. Number two is Sameer Maithel. Sameer Maithel is an energy engineer. He was based in Delhi, now based in Bangalore. And when I first met him, he described himself as the only person in the world who has a PhD in brick kilns, that literally his PhD work was in understanding brick kilns, and how do you improve their efficiency? And so I had had a lot of experience in Bangladesh. I went to India actually, because of a Stanford student whose father was the former head of the Brick Kiln Owners Association in Punjab state. So I went out to Punjab with Parabal Singh, Stanford student and with his dad, and we visited brick kilns across Punjab state and talked to all these brick kiln owners.

And just thinking a lot about interventions. And then on that trip was the first time I met with Sameer as well. Sameer just had this incredible experience of working for decades in the brick sector in India, and had tried a lot of things and had a lot of experience in terms of understanding kiln owners perspective and understanding government’s perspective.

And so he was just immediately a tremendously thoughtful partner. And he also challenged me in ways that I hadn't been challenged before. And that was really crucial because I was thinking about how do we get pollution out of the stack. And Sameer was always very polite. But even in that very first meeting, he said, have you thought about what's in this for the kiln owners?

What is it that's going to make them want to adopt? And getting us to think about the importance of an incentive compatible intervention. So he was just really crucial to us as a key collaborator and a thought partner, and ultimately really developed the technical components of the intervention.

Kate: I love to understand what happens when you actually go out to, as you talk about 7000 kilns across Bangladesh, as you go out to one of these kilns, how you're sharing this.

Stephen: So what we did is we started with a pilot and we started in western Bangladesh in a setting where the Brick Kiln Owners Association in the Jashore district expressed a lot of interest in this. And they had even some young kiln owners who seemed to be interested in trying something new. We started with some general organizational meetings. We had Sameer come, and we brought some of his colleagues from West Bengal who could speak in the local language in terms of their experience adopting improved efficiency.

So because of that, we had a lot more credibility. Now, we also brought the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. So that's another locally recognized group, and a group that has helped us a lot. And again, you know, giving us credibility so that we could introduce this to them, talk to the kiln owners and the kiln managers about it, because Kate actually, they're very risk averse.

They already have a business model that works fine. So why would they try to do anything differently when they're making a profit doing what they're doing? And you now are trying to tell them to stack the bricks differently and oh, they might fall down or they could have all any of these problems. So we needed to persuade them that we knew what we were talking about.

And so having Sameer and having those kiln owners from West Bengal really helped. And then we had to go to the kilns and talk to the workers and show them how to change things. So there were a couple of the workers’ tasks that had to change. And so what we found was that it was really important to send at least two people to every kiln.

You had to send an engineer to make sure that they did the technical things right. And we also had to send a social scientist because it's a very complex environment in terms of who's the boss, who's got power, different people's different perspectives, and folks trained in engineering just weren't attuned to all of those communication issues. And so we found that if we went with both of those, we could have better communication, we could get feedback.

And so that we could get them to agree to try. And then once you get some kilns trying and some will jump on right away. Others I know they want to wait and see. We want to see what happens to other people. And what we found was that then the early adopters could actually begin to immediately see the benefits of this.

And so then they became our local change makers. So we ultimately didn't need to bring in people from West Bengal anymore. We had people who had adopted these from Bangladesh.

Kate: So when you talk about the intervention being adopted, I'd love to hear more about kind of what has happened as a result of that, both what has happened as a result of that and what remains to be done.

Stephen: Yeah. So if they adopt the intervention, which is just simply stacking the bricks a little farther apart, feeding less coal in somewhat more frequently and adding some more insulation. By adopting these interventions, kiln owners were able to produce 100,000 bricks using three tons less coal per 100,000 bricks. So it's a 23% reduction in coal consumption and obviously three tons of coal is a lot of coal and coal is their biggest business expense. So this was a big benefit to them. In addition, they increased the number of class one bricks that they made. So class one bricks get a price premium. And because this system evened out combustion and improved heat exchange, we ended up with 19% more class one bricks. So that was another big benefit to them.

And from our perspective in terms of health and climate, well, we reduced the small particulate matter that drives that pneumonia by 19%. And we decreased the CO2 emissions by 19%. And so when we look at a kiln that has adopted these interventions, they emit 382 tonnes less CO2 a year compared to the kilns that are operating under usual practices.

Kate: So you've figured out a method that can be deployed by these kilns that has benefit to the planet, has benefit to health outcomes. And it sounds like very clearly has benefit also to business outcomes for the kiln owners themselves. On the heels of your publication in Science and this work, getting a lot of necessary attention, I want to hear from you, what would it take to reduce air pollution from brick manufacturing across South Asia?

Stephen: Well, as you probably know, air pollution is the single biggest killer across South Asia. So this is a really big issue to work on. And brick kilns are really important contributor. So we have an incentive compatible intervention that if we could just push this out, it will continue to sustain on its own. Really, we estimate with $8 million in philanthropic support, we could complete the conversion of the 7000 brick kilns across Bangladesh.

This would be a huge benefit. I mean, this would prevent the emission of 16 million tons of carbon dioxide by 2040. So really big on a planet scale and on an air pollution scale. And also this is not just going to stay in Bangladesh. We're already beginning to work in West Bengal, and we have plans to work across India and into Pakistan and Nepal, Sri Lanka as well.

So there is a huge opportunity in a very cost effective way to reduce air pollution and to reduce global warming by just taking some simple steps to improve brick manufacturing across the region.

Kate: Thank you, Steve, for your time today and for your many, many years of devoted research and dedication to figuring out a plausible solution to a really pressing challenge. It's a delight to hear that you're now sitting with a solution that has the potential to be scaled in really meaningful ways.

Stephen: Yeah, we're very excited to take this forward.

Kate: Thank you.

Stephen: Thanks, Kate.

Kate: Thank you for listening to What Would It Take? The show is produced by me, Kate Green Trip, along with Ashima Tshering. It is edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe and made possible by the team at Stanford Impact Labs. Stanford Impact Labs is a special initiative within the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University that invests in evidence and data driven projects, led by teams that aim to put social science to work for society. To learn more, please visit impact.stanford.edu.