Product Innovation and
Design
Brickworks partners with architects and builders to create innovative products and support the construction of highly efficient homes. Brickworks’ goal is to remain Australia’s leading building products company. Brickworks continually strives to improve quality and product integrity, while investing in product innovation. During FY20, Brickworks’ Australian operations formed a crossfunctional, national technical team and conducted a strategic review of Research, Development and Quality functions. The review identified opportunities for alignment and collaboration across Brickworks Building Products to help create unique products with unrivalled quality. Improvements have been made to our monitoring and tracking of a range of quality indicators, including waste and reparations. As a result, our teams have focussed on quality projects that have shown substantial product improvements and increased customer satisfaction. Customer aspirations will continue to be monitored throughout FY21.
70 p Brickworks Sustainability Report 2020
Product Design Clay Brick Improvements Brickworks continues to make incremental improvements to our clay bricks through ongoing research into increasing the core percentage volume to make clay bricks lighter weight. Development of new core patterns will reduce the amount of clay, the energy needed to fire the bricks, the fuel required for delivery and will make the bricks lighter for bricklayers. The addition of reclaimed or recycled materials into our clay bricks has lowered the energy demand during manufacture, reduced product weight and minimised the amount of virgin raw materials required.
Product Re-engineering High void bricks manufactured in Queensland have reduced raw material requirements by 11% and energy requirements by 15%. Trials are underway at Austral Bricks Wollert, Vic, and Golden Grove, SA, with good initial success.
