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- Country of residence: Palestine
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Engineer Rawan Abdel Latif places coal ash, cement, and other materials in a large basin to mix them before transferring them to the mold for making building bricks, while her colleague, engineer Majd Al-Mashharawi, is busy carrying the bricks that come out of the mold to check their level of hardness even before they dry.
The two engineers are supervising the implementation of their experiments for the first Palestinian and Arab - and perhaps international - innovation for manufacturing building bricks with new ingredients based on ash resulting from coal, cement, and other materials.
The idea of the project began when the two engineers sensed the problem of the weakness and fragility of building bricks manufactured in Gaza, so they decided to create a new, low-cost, high-quality alternative.
Their innovation is called "Green Cake", which is an environmentally friendly stone that uses recycled waste. Its weight is half the weight of a traditional brick and can be carried with one hand. It is about 30% less expensive, which gives it a high competitive advantage, according to what the two engineers told Al Jazeera Net.
Successful experiences
The two engineers confirm that the new bricks have been subjected to numerous experiments, and have proven their worth in terms of strength, air gaps, and burning tests, with approved specifications, in addition to the success of experiments with plaster, electrical extensions, and their accessories.
Although the two young women conduct their experiments with limited quantities of ash that they bring from a pottery making shop in Gaza, they are proud of their ability to transform their chemical and manufacturing experiments into practical results through the bricks that they make.
Rawan says that the motives for arriving at the project were complex, from their desire to stand out from their peers to their feeling as specialists about the magnitude of the problem of manufactured bricks in Gaza, and then their insistence on conveying a message to the world about Gaza’s ability to create, no matter how severe the siege is.
She adds with joy on her face, "Our feeling cannot be described as we make bricks with our own hands. It is a great challenge, but we succeeded after a year and a half of research and experiments, making it our first project in the world."
Ambition and difficulties
The two young women hope to succeed in opening the first factory for this type of brick, or operating a production line in one of the traditional brick factories, so that their innovation can be transformed from the scientific aspect to the practical and commercial framework. However, the project faces the problem of a shortage of coal ash in Gaza, which prompted them to search for a mechanism to bring the resulting ash. About the coal-fired power plant in Israel.
Majd acknowledges that the chronological age of the new bricks cannot be confirmed during the current stage due to the absence of laboratories capable of conducting this examination, which contributed to the slow development of the project until tests are conducted outside the sector to make improvements.
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