SA Affordable Housing March - April 2019 // Issue: 75 | Page 18

FEATURES
Call to aid informal brickmakers
Driving into small, rural towns around South Africa the Clay Brick Association
of South Africa’s (CBA) John Volsteedt looks for columns of smoke. He
says that if it isn’t the municipality burning garbage, it’s generally a good
indication of where he can find the town’s informal clay brickmakers.
By Warren Robertson | Images by John Volsteedt
Techniques currently result in inferior quality.
S
ince 2009 CBA sustainability desk manager Volsteedt
has reached out to brickmakers around the country in
an attempt uncover the scale of their operations, their
basic working conditions and to try and establish just
how sustainable the industry really is. His answers are
not encouraging.
“For informal brickmakers, It’s a bleak industry,”
Volsteedt explains. “No-one we have ever spoken to is in it
because it’s a good career. They are all doing it because
they have literally no other options. We go to a site with a
list of names of who should be working there drawn up on
the previous visit, but just a few months later, those guys
are gone and there’s a whole new team.”
“Working full days of back-breaking labour, an employee
at an informal brickyard can earn as little as R500 a month
and often the payment for this is deferred as they wait on a
client to buy the actual bricks,” he says explaining just a
small part of the problem. “Given literally any other chance,
or hope of a chance, the workers won’t be there.”
16
MARCH - APRIL 2019
But the social aspect of the informal industry is only one
small part of the overall problem with sustainability. In the
formal clay brick sector of South Africa, members file a
‘sustainability report’ for the CBA, in which nine
sustainability categories have been identified and reported
on; the 2017 report is the baseline.
The nine categories are energy, water, air pollution, green
house gas emissions, waste, materials, biodiversity, socio-
economic and continual improvement. In a report released
by the CBA and teams at EcoMetrix Africa (EM) and Partners
for Innovation (PfI) in September 2018, titled, ‘Identifying
Sustainable Consumption and Production Practices in
relation to the Informal / Small Scale Clay Brick Making
Sector in South Africa’, researchers attempt to analyse the
informal sector along the same lines and the results are grim.
Exactly 100% of the sites surveyed by the report make
use of non-mechanised mining and handmade green brick
production with hack line drying and the clamp kiln method
for firing bricks. Coal and coal ash are the primary sources
www.saaffordablehousing.co.za