Build for Living. Report.
P19 of 31
product re-engineering
Product engineering is the design or re-design of a product in order to improve its characteristics such as cost, saleability, ease of manufacture or, increasingly, to reduce its carbon footprint and improve its sustainability. Brickworks Building Products™ is actively involved in product engineering across our divisions to reduce the environmental impact of our manufacturing processes and ensure the long-term viability of our products.
Existing products
All our existing products are subject to critical examination and incremental improvement. For example, in Victoria a range of Austral Bricks® clay bricks has been redesigned to increase the capacity of their core holes and thereby reduce the amount of material required.
This is not simply a process of making larger holes: the size of the core holes has a considerable effect on the curing and firing of the unit and simply enlarging them may lead to units that are out of square or of inconsistent size. The re-engineering program required considerable research and the development of innovative new processes. The resulting lighter units use fewer materials and energy, reduce transport loads and are easier to handle on the building site. Austral Masonry® is also applying higher core values to some of its products and, as mentioned previously, making use of post-industrial waste products such as fly ash as a replacement for energy-hungry cement.