Market: Commonly used building material

Traditionally Afghan houses are built with unfired mud blocks and stone in the mountainous areas. While public buildings and upper class houses have been built with fired bricks for centuries, nowadays it is more common for houses in urban areas and, increasingly in rural areas, to use fired clay bricks as favoured building material. For keeping pace with the fast growing market for fired bricks, new brick kilns are mushrooming on a weekly basis. In Kabul, 50 new kilns have been established in last year alone.

Size of the brick sector in Afghanistan and its geographic concentration

Most of the brickyards are situated around the bigger cities (Kabul, Kandahar, Herat, etc.). Brickyards are usually located in brickyard clusters (also called brickfields) at the urban periphery where suitable clay can be mined. In Kabul there are about 670 brickyards with a production of approximately estimated around 2.3 billion bricks per year.

Brick entrepreneurs

Brick making is a traditional business, usually owned by old brick-maker dynasties and landlords, employing brick-makers for seasonal exploitation of their clayey soil. A brickyard unit produces several million bricks each year and many families operate several brickyards simultaneously. Despite most brick-makers being (very) wealthy businessmen, brick-making is rather a low prestige business, compared to other industries. Most brick-makers have only a basic education and the bad working conditions of the brick labourers, as well as the polluting kilns, leave a dirty and unsocial taste to this industry, which well educated entrepreneurs try to escape. However many brick-makers have also other businesses and follow their brick business rather passively, visiting the kiln usually in the evenings, 3-5 times a week.

The Brick Industry’s legal status

The status of brick production is an informal industry, without any industry specific policy or legal framework or tax regulation. There are no emission standards or baseline figures available for brick kilns yet.

Required Raw Material

Brickyards are situated within the clay mining areas usually at the periphery of urban areas, often in valleys and wadis that are accessible for coal supply trucks and clients. Clay is mined manually, or by mechanised excavators, and transported by tractor, trolleys or donkeys to the nearby mixing and moulding areas. In certain cases clay mines are located in fertile agricultural land, or in zones of future urbanisation. Depending on the topography and the modes of mining clay, mining can have a negative impact by destroying agricultural land or zones of urban expansion, or it can be useful, if it levels cliffs which cannot be used by farmers or real estate developers.

Coal, the second key-raw material is mined in Northern Afghanistan, supplying to the City of Kabul and other brickfields in the Northern half of the country. Brick-makers in Southern Afghanistan used to import coal from Pakistan.