ARE Professor Aprajit Mahajan publishes in Science

In South Asia, most brick manufacturing occurs in traditional coal-fired kilns that are among the greatest contributors of air pollution in the region. But managing the greenhouse gas emissions from such informal industries is difficult because of weak state and regulatory capacity. A recent paper in Science by ARE Professor Aprajit Mahajan and co-authors evaluated a low-cost intervention to improve the energy efficiency of "zigzag" kilns and conducted a randomized controlled trial of the intervention among 276 kilns in Bangladesh. They found that simple modifications to operational practices at these kilns in reduced their energy use, emissions, and fuel costs while improving brick quality. Using a social cost of carbon of 185 USD per metric ton to value the reductions in CO₂ emissions, they found the benefits of the intervention outweighed the costs by a factor of 65 to 1.