Talking Climate · The Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy

30: How Cheaper, Safer, and Cleaner Bricks Could Revolutionize Homebuilding Across Asia

·35 min·2 clips

Build Up Nepal’s houses were 40% cheaper, and 24 buildings survived the 2023 quake undamaged.

1. Talking Climate focuses on Build Up Nepal and its low-cost brick housing model for Nepal. 2. Ross Chambliss hosts Bjorn Soderberg, co-founder of Build Up Nepal, whose 25 years in Nepal shape the discussion. 3. The episode asks how a housing technology can be cheaper, safer, and cleaner for very low-income families. 4. Soderberg says he went to Nepal on a gap year, lived with nine Nepalese orphans, and stayed after meeting his wife. 5. He describes Nepal as a place where schools, solar panels, and poverty trends improve while the Himalayas melt and flash floods increase. 6. He also recalls Nepal’s recent political unrest, including a protest that ended in shootings and an overthrow of the government by young people. 7. Before Build Up Nepal, he started Watabaran, a paper recycling business that sold recycled paper in Sweden. 8. He later worked on Shuba briquettes, which used agricultural waste to replace firewood and coal in boilers. 9. He also founded Web Search, an IT company that builds digital tools and mobile applications for groups such as the Stockholm Water Institute and UNIDO. 10. The 2015 Nepal earthquake, including a second quake a month later, destroyed 800,000 homes and exposed how poverty made stone-and-mud houses fail. 11. Soderberg says the starting question became how to build homes that the poorest families could afford, that would survive earthquakes, and that would also be eco-friendly. 12. He says Nepal’s brick industry produces one third of the country’s CO2 emissions and uses 28,000 child laborers in brick kilns. 13. The technology he settled on uses compressed stabilized earth bricks based on sand, soil, a little cement, and sometimes industrial ashes. 14. He says the bricks use 90-95% locally available materials and are made with manually powered machines that need no electricity. 15. He explains that the biggest innovation is the business model, which trains driven local entrepreneurs to buy machines, run small factories, and build in their own communities. 16. He says the model has spread to about 220 active enterprises and created about 2,000 jobs in villages where jobs are usually concentrated in cities. 17. He says the 2023 earthquake in West Nepal tested the system, and 24 buildings built by two entrepreneurs remained undamaged while most other buildings in the area were destroyed. 18. He says the episode has a practical, interview-driven tone, with Soderberg moving between personal history, field examples, and technical explanations. 19. People interested in low-cost housing, climate adaptation, and social enterprise in South Asia would likely appreciate it. 20. People wanting a short celebrity interview or pure policy debate might skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded climate story about bricks, jobs, and rebuilding homes.

This is a story about bricks, but it really lands as a story about housing after disaster. Build Up Nepal is making compressed, low-cement blocks from local materials instead of coal-fired bricks, and Ross Chambliss and Bjorn Soderberg keep the focus on what matters in Nepal:…

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You want a cheaper, stronger way to rebuild homes that also cuts pollution.

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