A practical evaluation of brick cleaning methods before reuse

Before a demolished brick can be reused in a new construction, any or most of the adhering mortar needs to be cleaned off. This can be both a labor and machine intensive task, which both increases the market price of the reused brick, effects its visual appearance and potentially affects its properties as a “reused brick”. To make reused bricks competitive as a building material, the cleaning method needs to be effective, without reducing the quality of the brick. This work evaluates five different manual cleaning methods, by assessing the initial rate of absorption before and after, for a specific series of bricks and mortars. Furthermore, a short qualitative assessment of the method and resulting bricks is given, based on this low volume brick cleaning.