Financial Times

80 % of clay bricks inferior
By Lenin Amarawickrama
A premier research agency in Sri Lanka has come up with a startling (for the layperson) but possibly known fact (in the industry) - that at least 80 percent of the clay (red) bricks used for common construction purposes are inferior in quality.

The tests were carried out by the National Building Research Organization (NBRO), a semi-government body responsible for building construction research in Sri Lanka.

Last year, the NBRO carried out 13 quality tests on locally manufactured bricks. Only two passed the test.

NBRO officials said that there are two types of bricks in Sri Lanka, machine made wire cut bricks and normal, hand made bricks, which have two grades. The water absorption rate is also gauged in testing the quality of bricks. Quality machine made bricks should absorb less than 18 percent water while quality hand made bricks should have an absorption rate of less that 28 percent.

Many of the bricks brought by producers for testing at the NBRO do not comply with dimensional requirements too, officials pointed out. Though the standard dimension should be 220 x 105 x 65 (millimetres), many bricks fail this test.

Back to Business