Austria-headquartered bricks manufacturer Wienerberger hopes to set up a factory at Cheyyar, Tamil Nadu. Its application for a minor mineral mining licence has been pending decision for two years.

The €3.12-billion Wienerberger AG (‘AG’ means it is a listed company) has factories all over the world, but its only plant in Asia is near Kunigal village, some 70 km west of Bengaluru, which went on stream in 2009.

Karnataka plant

The wholly owned Indian subsidiary is a mid-size company, but is growing at 30-40 per cent a year.

The Kunigal plant produces 70,000 large, hollow bricks a day, each as big as nine regular bricks, laid out in a 3x3 matrix. The factory was built with an investment of ₹250 crore and is fully robotised.

Wienerberger India’s Managing Director Monnanda Appaiah has told BusinessLine that the company chose Kunigal because of the easy availability of the principal raw material – clay. The region abounds with about 70 dead waterbodies, each not less than 100 acres in size and Wienerberger has chosen two of them.

Scooping clay out from the dry ponds also helps rejuvenate them. The operations are energy intensive. Apart from 350 tonnes of coal for the kilns, the factory consumes 9 million units of electricity, almost all of which comes from solar or wind, Appaiah said.

At Cheyyar, the company has acquired 70 acres of land, half for mining clay and the other half for the factory. There is a lot of demand for the company’s products in Tamil Nadu and hence the plan for the new plant.

Hi-tech brick-making

Brick-making is generally assumed to be a cottage industry, where the operations involve nothing more than compacting clay into bricks and firing them in coal- or wood-fired kilns. But at Wienerberger, the operations are pretty hi-tech, involving analysis of the clay for chemical properties (the more alkaline, the better) and physical characteristics (size of the grains).

Other material such as rice bran, granite slurry, are added to impart weight-bearing properties. Operations such as mixing, making a dough of clay, extrusion into hollow bricks, drying and firing are all fully automated.

For structures up to 3 storeys high, if Wienerberger’s bricks are used, pillars are not needed as the walls can bear the load. The company also makes bricks that can just be glued together without mortar. The superglue is imported.

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