VietNamNet Bridge - Nguyen Cao Hoang Sang, a student at HCM City Architect University, has created green building materials from scrap paper after seven months of research.

Sang looked for solutions to make building materials friendly to the environment. 

He said older students had created eco-friendly bricks but they were not put into commercial development because of high production costs. So he decided to find a way to make bricks from scrap paper.

He went to every corner in the city to collect scrap paper, from classrooms and photocopy shops to bookstores and tried to make plaster with the materials. 

After that, he ground the plaster and mixed it with sand and cement to create a mixture of concrete. 

The two major elements of Sang’s unburned bricks were binder and aggregate. The ratios of the two elements in bricks can be changed depending on their purpose.

Sang said he experimented many times to be sure the products could obtain the compressive strength needed. 

Sang has created two types of bricks, one for building partitions to separate rooms inside houses and the other for building retaining walls.

Experiments showed that the bricks did not degrade after one week of being soaked in water, and they still maintained hardness. 

The bricks did not catch fire after 30 minutes of being on a stove.

The bricks can be made on a very simple production line which can be implemented in small workshops with low initial investment capital. 

They are friendly to the environment, soundproof, heat insulating and have good bearing power.

Being lightweight is the outstanding advantage of the bricks made of waste paper. 

Investors can save money on building foundations, while workers can easily implement construction works.

Phan The Vinh, a lecturer at the HCM City Architecture University, noted that Sang’s bricks can bring big benefits.

“Since the bricks are made of waste paper, they are very lightweight, and construction can go faster. The toxicity will also be eased,” he noted.

The bricks are believed to have low selling prices and have bigger advantages than the other two unbaked bricks available in the market – cement aggregate bricks and autoclaved aerated concrete bricks.

A lot of traditional brick kilns that caused environment pollution have been forced to stop operation. However, lightweight materials still have not been used for construction works.

The Ministry of Construction decided that since January 15, 2013, the state funded construction works in third-grade or higher urban areas must use 100 percent of unburned building materials. The construction works in the other areas must use 50 percent of unburned materials at minimum. The proportion will be 100 percent after 2015.

However, the regulation has been ignored.

Thien Nhien