Sasthra Vedhi proposes innovative ‘blue bricks’ to bury hazardous wastes and cut carbon footprint

The Sasthra Vedhi has floated a proposal to “bury” hazardous wastes like nickel-cadmium batteries and CFL lamps in concrete blocks used for construction.

The Sasthra Vedhi has floated a proposal to “bury” hazardous wastes like nickel-cadmium batteries and CFL lamps in concrete blocks used for construction.

The decentralised method of processing such wastes, the organisation claims, will significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions traditionally associated with waste disposal.

By embedding 50 discarded AA-sized batteries within the cavity of four-inch concrete blocks, the Sasthra Vedhi found through laboratory tests that the blocks could be used for construction. Tests conducted at the Materials Testing Laboratory of the Government Engineering College, Barton Hill here, found that the resultant product achieved a compression strength of 4 N/mm2, considerably higher than the requirement for building blocks (3.5 N/mm2).

The pro-Congress science organisation, spearheaded by former Head of Kerala University’s Department of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Achuthsankar S. Nair, also proposed that CFL lamps can be packed in waste paper before being buried in eight-inch concrete blocks to prevent a possible leakage of mercury.

Such concrete blocks should be covered using cement mortars to ensure the embedded materials are tightly packed within hollow bricks. Besides, the blocks should be prepared in a manner the load is transferred on these, and not the materials filled within.

Sasthra Vedhi has proposed naming such blocks as blue bricks, and painting blue strips on such materials to demarcate them from the conventional ones. While emphasising a critical restriction that the bricks must not be broken to ensure they do not pose a risk to public health or the environment, Prof. Nair points out the blue bricks could ideally be employed in large scale for use in construction projects undertaken by local bodies.

Citing estimates of over 2 crore of used CFL lamps in the State, the academic said: “Currently, most CFLs end up in the hands of scrap buyers who break the glass to extract the aluminium base for recycling, causing the hazardous mercury to leach into the soil and also expose workers to harmful vapours.”