Can Waste-Based Ceramics Replace Cement in Thai Homes?

What MTEC’s Ceramics Group Actually Researches

MTEC’s Ceramics and Construction Materials Research Group works on eco-friendly ceramics, not medical bioceramics. The group’s own page describes its mission as converting natural resources and industrial waste into ceramic products with a defined microstructure — geopolymer binders, glazes, and construction materials.

“Bioceramics,” the term this idea started from, is a different field inside MTEC entirely. Researchers there develop nano-hydroxyapatite and calcium phosphate particles for bone tissue engineering, under the center’s Polymer Unit. That work has nothing to do with walls, roofs, or Thai homes.

So the honest version of this idea isn’t “bioceramics in construction.” It’s: what is MTEC’s actual construction-ceramics group building, and does any of it belong in a Thai house? Two projects answer that — geopolymer bricks and a cool-roof glaze.

Geopolymer Bricks: Building Walls From Power Plant Waste

Geopolymer bricks replace cement entirely with fly ash, an alkaline activator, and industrial byproducts — no clinker, no kiln firing. MTEC researchers tested foundry sand, fly ash, and electric arc furnace slag mixed at a 40:30:30 ratio with sodium hydroxide, and the resulting brick reached a compressive strength of 25.76 MPa after 28 days of ambient curing — no kiln required.

The fly ash itself comes from a real Thai waste stream. Related: waste-to-energy. Thailand’s Mae Moh power plant produces roughly 10,000 tonnes of coal ash a day, and only part of it is currently reused. Every brick made from that ash is one less brick that needed Portland cement, and one less tonne of ash sitting in a landfill.

Separate MTEC work has pushed the chemistry further. Adding basalt fiber and titanium dioxide to a fly ash geopolymer produced bricks with 44% higher compressive strength after 15 thermal cycles than fiber-free samples — a meaningful gain for a tropical climate where materials cycle through heat and rain constantly.

Cool-Roof Tiles: A Pigment That Cuts Indoor Heat by 2°C

A near-infrared reflective glaze on ceramic roof tiles measurably lowered indoor temperature in a real side-by-side Thai test. Read our full guide to geothermal cooling. Researchers built two identical test houses, roofed one with tiles glazed in a new pigment (S9) and the other with a standard commercial green glaze, then measured the results directly.

The S9-glazed house came out about 2°C cooler across all three measured positions than the control house, according to the American Ceramic Society’s writeup of the field test. The pigment reflected 76.3% of near-infrared radiation, against 65.7% for the standard glaze.

Two degrees might sound small, but it isn’t trivial for a house running air conditioning most of the day. Colored tiles matter here specifically because plain white roofs reflect more heat but many Thai homeowners won’t put a white roof over a pitched, visible house — this pigment gets most of the thermal benefit in a color people will actually choose.

Why You Can’t Buy Either One Yet

Both projects are still stuck between the lab and the hardware store. Researchers who studied industrial-scale fly ash geopolymer brick production noted that while lab samples work, standard-size industrial production remains largely unexplored. Nobody has proven this scales past a test mold.

The cool-roof pigment faces the same gap. It was demonstrated on 50 tiles across two test houses — real data, but a pilot, not a commercial product line a roofing supplier stocks today. Neither material has a listed price, a Thai distributor, or a building-code approval that a contractor could point to.

That’s the honest caveat against the idea’s implicit promise. Lab-proven and market-ready are different claims, and right now both of MTEC’s ceramics projects sit on the lab-proven side of that line.

Scaling up a geopolymer brick isn’t just a bigger mixer. Fly ash composition varies between power plants and even between batches at the same plant, so a mix ratio validated in a 5cm test cube doesn’t automatically hold at construction-block size. Curing conditions, activator handling, and quality control all need re-proving at production scale before any manufacturer would put a warranty behind the product.

There’s also a supply-chain question nobody in the research has fully answered yet: who would make these at scale, and would it be cheaper than importing cement clinker? Foundry sand and electric arc furnace slag are localized industrial byproducts, not a nationwide feedstock, so a commercial version would need a dedicated collection and mixing operation near the waste source.

The Bigger Picture: Thailand’s Push Toward Green Building Materials

Thailand’s cement industry isn’t waiting on lab research to cut emissions — it’s already moving through a faster, more conventional path. Through the Thai Cement Manufacturers Association’s clinker-substitution push, the sector has cut more than 3.8 million tonnes of CO2e since 2019. The sector achieved the relevant clinker-substitution milestone under Thailand’s NDC Roadmap nine years ahead of schedule.

Hydraulic cement became subject to mandatory compliance with TIS 2594-2567 on 17 June 2025. Ordinary Portland cement has not been banned; it remains a regulated and permitted product under TIS 15-2562, although hydraulic cement is increasingly being adopted as a lower-clinker alternative.

Hydraulic cement, a blended low-carbon formula rather than a novel waste-based material, is now the primary structural cement used across Thai infrastructure, public buildings, and residential construction. That’s a meaningful distinction: the industry’s biggest carbon win so far came from reformulating an existing, familiar product, not from replacing it with something entirely new like a geopolymer brick.

MTEC’s research fits into that picture as a longer bet. Waste-based ceramics could eventually stack on top of the cement industry’s own decarbonization — using fly ash that survives the shift to hydraulic cement, or building envelope materials that cut cooling demand on top of a lower-carbon structural frame. Neither cancels the other out; they’re solving different parts of a house’s carbon footprint.

What’s Actually on Shelves Today: Low-Carbon Cement

If you want a lower-carbon building material in Thailand right now, it’s not a geopolymer brick — it’s low-carbon cement, and SCG already sells it at scale. SCG’s hydraulic, low-carbon cement now accounts for roughly 70% of the cement it sells in Thailand, with the company targeting 100%, and it’s priced to match ordinary Portland cement rather than at a premium.

This matters because Thailand’s cement sector is the country’s single largest industrial emitter. Cement accounts for about 39% of Thailand’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, and cementitious materials — structural concrete, cement finishes, and mortar — carry the highest carbon footprint of any component in a typical Thai house, 130 to 261 kg CO2e per square meter depending on the build.

That chart is a genuine range, not a single number — reported CO2 savings for geopolymer-style materials swing from 9% to 80% depending on how a study accounts for the energy cost of making the alkaline activators. Sodium silicate and sodium hydroxide production isn’t free either, and that’s exactly the kind of accounting gap MTEC’s lab bricks haven’t been tested against at scale yet.

What This Means for Thai Homeowners and Builders

For anyone building or renovating a home in Thailand today, the practical move is low-carbon cement, not geopolymer bricks. Learn more about compression cast concrete. It’s already in the supply chain, priced competitively, and doesn’t require betting on unproven materials. Any contractor working with SCG-supplied cement is likely using it already without a special request.

The geopolymer brick and cool-roof tile research matter for a longer horizon. If either scales to commercial production, they’d cut both embodied carbon and cooling load in a country where air conditioning is one of the biggest line items on a household electric bill. That’s a real contribution to green building in Thailand — just not one ready to specify on a bill of materials this year.

Watch for two signals before treating this as available: a named Thai manufacturer producing geopolymer brick at standard construction sizes, and a Thai Industrial Standard (TIS) certification. Neither exists yet. Until one does, this stays research to track, not a material to ask your builder for.