Brick dust from demolished building.

A large brick building in my city is being demolished, and the bricks are free to take. There's also a large amount of brick/mortar dust in the piles.

I'm going to get as many bricks as I can until they're gone, but I was wondering if it would also be a good idea to take large quantities of the dust. I think I remember reading once that brick dust, when wetted and packed down makes a pretty hard surface. Could it be used as a filler in earthbags? Are there other uses I could put it to?

I love it when the bricks are free!  
I like your plan of getting them until they are gone!
In the high desert, brick dust might make a good hard surface.
For the rest of us, it would become a clay skating rink as soon as it rained or snowed
It would be great for use in filling earth bags.

Erika House wrote:A large brick building in my city is being demolished, and the bricks are free to take. There's also a large amount of brick/mortar dust in the piles.

I'm going to get as many bricks as I can until they're gone, but I was wondering if it would also be a good idea to take large quantities of the dust. Could it be used as a filler in earthbags? Are there other uses I could put it to?

What does one do with earth bags, around here the bags used to hold back flood a little start breaking down very shortly, and then one has a huge mess.  alot of bags (1000's used) require 100's of people to set in place.  

So I was curious what a person would do with a earthbag filled with brick dust?

You could use the brick dust and pieces mixed with lime to make opus signinum  - water resistant Roman concrete. You would have to experiment with the ratios. It could be used to build foundations, cisterns or just poured on the floor.

I have carted many bricks, and you dont get many in a load unless you have special equipment.
I have always found the dust to be a problem so I have avoided getting any,.
But how would you safely collect it?
Would there be asbestos in the dust?

Do you have clay soil?  Brick dust could be added to improve the soil.

I have red that it is used on baseball field to improve drainage and make an uniform playing field.

Well, my sister gave me about 750 bricks, with mortar attached, last autumn, from parts of 2 chimneys which she demolished in a house she and her husband are renovating.  These chimneys had been reduced below the roof deck by a previous owner of the home, and were originally built as "hanging" chimneys (meaning they were suspended on the buildings frame, rather than extending down to a proper footing), a common practice in cheap housing a hundred or a hundred and a half years ago in these parts as a way to use fewer bricks and so economize.  Hence demolished in this renovation, though the old kitchen cook stove stack will remain.  I've already been working on her about installing a solid fuel cook stove as backup heat.

Over the course of about 2 weeks of evenings and Saturdays, I chipped the mortar off all of the bricks, and restacked them on a pallet in the side yard.  I plan to use them to build a bake oven, though the exact form and location of this oven remains an open question.  I did break a few bricks in the process of cleaning off the mortar, but I'll likely need some partial bricks, so those were retained, rather than broken up into smaller pieces.

In any case, I spanned a couple of short 2x4s (salvaged out of a broken pallet), across the sides of a steel wheelbarrow, as my work surface, and scaled the mortar off the bricks into the wheelbarrow (mostly - a bit flew elsewhere).  I used my $2 brick hammer, acquired several years ago in the expectation that some masonry job would pop up eventually, and I'd be glad then that I'd bought the used brick hammer now!

Surprisingly, some of the mortar had been vitrified by the heat on what had been the interior face of the chimneys (and, not so surprisingly, a few of the bricks, as well - but I was under the impression that all lime-based materials, including Portland cement, will calcine rather than vitrify when exposed to intense heat).

I ended up with multiple wheelbarrow loads of lime-based brick mortar, with a few chips of brick mixed in, as well (also, a couple of good blood blisters, where my piloting skills weren't quite up to the task at hand!).  I put these loads of broken mortar and mortar dust into the worst of the spots in our driveway which are soft and muddy at both ends of the winter, and tamped the mortar dust well into the earth.  It is now mud season again (we've had a quick melt in the last few days, and our more than 200 inches of lake effect snow is fast disappearing).  I am happy to report that the more firm places in the mushy bit of the driveway are those spots where I spread and tamped in the mortar dust.  Now, there are new "worst" spots, and I'll have to shift my attention to those.

So, this seems to have been a successful use of mortar dust (at least, so far).

Greetings all,
  This has little to do with brick dust, but much to do about bringing old bricks back to life.

Tools that will help greatly:
--one of those low cost, but easy to operate 3 legged auto adjust saw horses
--a 4.5" grinder with a stone disk
-- a full face respirator   very low cost for what they are. Available on Amazon.

I will try to find photos of all three


Step one:   Have your old brick pallet on your right or left side  And clean pallet opposite and if you can have these waste high, so much the better.
Step two:   your grinder, on a little stand, also waste high.
step three:  3 legged saw horse in the middle

step 4:  you will quickly learn how to place a brick surface just above the jaws, or have a small piece of wood below jaw surface, and swap in a new brick and the surface to clean will always be above the jaws.

Step 5:  You have 6 sides, but only seconds on each side, so you will learn to change the brick around without laying down the grinder,  Notice there is no hammer chipping involved.  Your goal is to get a flat surface, but might have signs of past mortar colors

Step 6: avoiding brick dust is #1, but avoiding brick dust to eyes is a close second. Thus outside and in windy conditions helps. But full face mase is a great help as well.

And there you go,  I seldom take more than a minute per brick, thus 60 per hour is inline.

Nothing says you have to do this for hours, as this easy to set up and take down.  ( morning chores)
I can't express how much different it is, having the brick contained vs trying to hold onto it works so much better.

The 3 legged vice you will use for the rest of  your life.  It is quick and simple.
the grinding disk not so much, but at $22-$25,  to clean 500 free bricks?  you can do the math.
The angle grinder, you get what you pay for, most of the time.   I do like the torque of 110 volt ones, but battery units do work.
the full face mask, I don't understand at all, as there are $25 ones and $199 ones, made by the same company, and look and work the same.  Up to you.

So these are just thoughts..  100's of things to do in life,  these are just a few things that help everyday you have them.

These are exactly what I was looking for! I particularly like the idea of using it to fill in some of the mushy areas of my driveway.

Went by the site this morning to see what I could get, a lot of it is more broken chunks than full bricks, plus the dust. So I'm just going to take as much rubble as I can get to lay away for a rubble trench foundation for an eventual earthbag building.
Same with the dust.

Since one of my mottos is "you never know when..." I'd rather get as much as I can now before I really have a solid plan for using it, than wish I had it when I do need it.

Kevin Olson wrote:I put these loads of broken mortar and mortar dust into the worst of the spots in our driveway which are soft and muddy at both ends of the winter, and tamped the mortar dust well into the earth.  It is now mud season again (we've had a quick melt in the last few days, and our more than 200 inches of lake effect snow is fast disappearing).  I am happy to report that the more firm places in the mushy bit of the driveway are those spots where I spread and tamped in the mortar dust.  Now, there are new "worst" spots, and I'll have to shift my attention to those.

So, this seems to have been a successful use of mortar dust (at least, so far).

The attached is my evidence in support of my assertion of (qualified?) success.

As you can see, there are ruts which cross the lighter-colored (mortar dust enhnced) areas, deeper on either side of these light colored spots, and barely perceptible across them.  Thus, seems to be working as hoped.

At least there was no standing water when I took this photo on Saturday.  On Friday, we had a brief thunderstorm, while I was mending the brakes on my daily driver, after which the entire area was a "vernal pond".  There is a fractured concrete pad just to the left, where the bumper of my firewood fetcher truck is parked in this photo.  That proved a reasonably stable base for a jack, jack stand and wheel chocks, with careful vehicle positioning.  There was even room for a 5 gallon bucket as a stool, while I was playing the torch on the rusty fittings.  Safely doing the job in the mud would have required some thinking, for sure.

This whole area needs several inches of crushed urbanite/Hyrkasite or mine rock - or brick mortar detritus, apparently.  The main driveway, where my wife parks, is much higher (a good foot, anyway, built up with crushed mine rock - just local basalt, straight from the crusher, cheap and effective), but I am resigned to wearing knee boots for the foreseeable future (fashion forward - that's me!).  In the best of all possible worlds, this area will become the truck dock area, when my as-yet-theoretical timber framed garage-cum-shop is built, with an automotive lift riggable as a dock lift in the car bay nearest the street, with a dock plate extensible through a rolling door on the gable end.  This could be the summer of the garage.  We'll see...