Development and evaluation of green fired clay bricks using industrial and agricultural wastes

Green construction materials have emerged as viable options to cope with the sustainability challenges set by the global communities without compromising the technical merits. Agro-industrial wastes have been utilized as alternative components in manufacturing construction products. In this vein, burnt clay bricks (CBs) is one of the novel and viable waste disposal strategy. Therefore, the primary focus of this research is to examine the impacts of agro-industrial wastes, such as sludge waste (SW), steel slag (SS), wood ash (WA), and banana ash (BA) on various physical, mechanical, and microstructure characteristics. The green CBs were prepared by admixing the wastes at a 5%, 10%, 15%, and 20% dosage. The binary blended CBs were dried under the sun for 7 days before being fired at 900 °C for 3 hrs. The CBs containing SW, WA, and BA exhibited lower compressive strengths of ∼67% than the control and SS blended specimens depending on the chemical composition and particle size distribution of the source material. The microstructural analysis of the CBs incorporating the wastes tented to improve with the addition of waste precursors and governed by the Ca/Si ratio. The outcomes revealed the potential of attaining reduced bulk density for the light-weight and cost-effective constructions with low volume (5%) replacement of studied wastes in the clay mixture. The scanning electron microscopic (SEM) analysis revealed a relatively compact matrix of the control and SS-based specimens which tended to improve the engineering properties of developed CBs.