One of the news headlines I saw on my pager today was “China to ban traditional bricks.”
What’s up with that? I did a search of a couple of news sources, but haven’t found anything.
Perhaps it’s a derrogatory slur when you refer to someone as a “brick”?
<running, ducking, avoiding imaginged gunfire>
maybe they meant to ban traditionaly brick-ing in public toilets? 
starfish’s link didn’t work for me (it wanted a password).
To make a short story shorter: Their traditional brick making process causes too much pollution.
Starfish: The New Youk Times wants a password. What does the article say?
Give me a minute to read and summarize it.
The nytimes.com is free. Just sign up with your own user name and password.
Basically the bricks are made from clay and baked in coal fired kilns. Chinese coal has high sulfur content so they get a lot of polution. They also want brick makers to use furnace ash instead of clay. This lets them use land for farming instead of mining clay.