SAIC Builds a Green “Technological Marvel” for Boral Bricks

The largest brick maker in the United States and SAIC have come together to build a brick plant that is zero-waste, derives most of its energy from a landfill and has been called a "technological marvel."

It is appropriate that such a factory should make the ancient, seemingly low-tech brick, because the brick is a candidate to be the building materials industry's poster child for an eco-friendly building material. It provides excellent insulation and stability. It does not give off harmful gases or contain toxic chemicals. It's also reusable and recyclable. It's made from clay, an abundant natural material. But there is one drawback — making a brick requires a significant amount of energy in the form of heat.

Boral Bricks and SAIC found an ingenious response to the energy demand and other environmental issues in Boral's new, state-of-the-art brick plant.

Foresight and Ingenuity

The 295,000-square-foot plant in Terre Haute, Ind., is sustainable for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the central one is that it gets approximately 70 percent of the energy it uses for the brick-making process from methane piped from a nearby landfill.

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and until the Boral plant started to use it to fire its kiln, the landfill operator dealt with it according to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations — as a waste product — and flared it to the atmosphere.

"They were just flaring off the methane they were collecting," said Rich Mitchell, the SAIC program manager for the Terre Haute effort. The Boral plant "is a windfall for the landfill operator," he said, adding, "What was a significant maintenance expense for them is now a significant revenue stream."

Blocking Out a Prime Location

Boral is an Australian company with its U.S. headquarters in Atlanta. The company intended to expand into the Midwest and hired SAIC's wholly owned design-build subsidiary, The Benham Companies, LLC, to assist.

Boral wanted SAIC's world-class design-build services, which integrate all aspects of the design and construction of a facility into a single contract. It also wanted to find the best place to locate its new facility. The closer the facility site could be to raw materials and alternative energy sources, as well as key markets in the Midwest region, the better.

"We performed GIS [Geographic Information Service] studies to identify clay deposit areas throughout the Midwest region," said Mitchell, "and overlaid operating landfills to locate properties with both clay for use as the raw material and landfill gas for use as a fuel source."

According to Dave Harkness, a senior environmental scientist who was involved in the site selection process, GIS mapping enables the overlay of a wide variety of information, such as geologic, regulatory and environmental data. "GIS really enables you to optimize the location of a facility." GIS, he said, makes "finding a needle in the haystack a lot easier."

Harkness said, "Boral provided Benham with the parameters for locating their facilities." The parameters included general locations in the U.S., abundant availability of clay, air quality regulations suitable for brick-making processes, and proximity of landfills for obtaining methane gas cheaply, as well as others.

"The concept to target landfill gas was a very early decision," said Neil Waggoner, an SAIC program manager. Boral was already using landfill methane in an Oklahoma plant.

"The average sanitary landfill," Harkness said, "will produce methane from biodegradation — the decay of the waste in a landfill."

Stockpiled Clay

"Another unique aspect of the site selection," Mitchell said, "is that this area of Indiana had — and still does have — a large resource of coal. In the early 1900s, there were little or no regulations to protect the environment during the coal strip-mining operations. The clay was simply 'in the way' of the valuable coal, so the coal companies moved the clay to very large stockpiles to expose the coal. The 'stockpile properties' were abandoned by the coal companies — leaving them virtually unusable. The final site selection for the Boral facility contains nearly 100 acres of huge clay stockpiles."

Which means that Boral does not have to spend much money — or energy — to transport their raw material to the plant. The Terre Haute location also places finished brick close to key housing markets — particularly Chicago and Indianapolis.

The facility opened last March and is capable of producing 120 million bricks per year. In a press release, Boral said that the "facility is not only the largest brick manufacturing facility in the U.S., but it is also one of the most energy efficient." It also referred to the plant as "a technological marvel featuring robotic setting and packaging as well as an advanced firing process."

SAIC is currently applying for the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED® Silver certification for the plant. LEED, or Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, uses its Green Building Rating System™ to encourage and accelerate "global adoption of sustainable green building and development practices through the creation and implementation of universally understood and accepted tools and performance criteria."