Stanford Impact Labs:Clearing the air

After decades of work on a range of health issues in South Asia, Luby knew he had to tackle brick kilns head-on. His breakthrough wasn’t built on high-tech interventions or expensive infrastructure. Instead, it came from understanding the constraints and incentives of kiln operators. 

In 2021, Luby received a two-year $500,000 grant from Stanford Impact Labs. The grant allowed him and his project partners to implement a randomized controlled trial, which would generate evidence to motivate brick kiln owners, government agencies, and others to clean up their practices.

Luby’s team discovered that modest changes—stacking bricks less densely for better airflow and feeding coal continuously in smaller amounts—improved combustion efficiency. This reduced coal use by 23 percent, cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent, and produced higher-quality bricks that sold for nearly 20 percent more, according to an upcoming study.

The success is grounded in what Luby considers a basic truth: The private sector is the planet’s largest polluter, so solving environmental crises requires working with industry.

The intervention has gained traction rapidly. Improvements were so dramatic during the study that kiln owners assigned to the control group began quietly sending people to the intervention sites to learn about the techniques. 

After presenting early findings to the country’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change, Luby steeled himself for more of the skepticism government officials had expressed when he first went to them with his idea years earlier. 

“We have these big meetings, and people tell us how bad things are in Bangladesh,” the head of the agency said. “You have come with a solution.”

For Luby, the government’s pledge of support validated years of close collaboration with local researchers and business representatives. 

Since then, the changes have spread to more than 500 of Bangladesh’s approximately 7,000 brick kilns, and Luby’s work has drawn attention from surprising corners. A staff member in a U.S. senator’s office recently expressed interest.

“He really liked the notion that we could be working in settings and coming up with solutions that didn’t require big government or huge political consensus,” Luby says.

Luby sees more simple interventions on the horizon. With support from Stanford’s Sustainability Accelerator, his team is working with mechanical engineering students to develop an automatic coal feeder that can deliver fuel to brick kilns in a controlled and continuous manner, further improving efficiency. 

He’s also exploring alternative fuel sources, such as rice straw—a crop waste byproduct—and working with architects to design buildings that would use smaller, more efficient bricks that require less coal. In 2024, he became faculty director of the newly launched Stanford Center for Human and Planetary Health, which seeks to advance solutions that sustain nature and support human health.

“A lot of what we need to do to improve the world does not require cutting-edge technology,” Luby says. “It’s about understanding people’s realities and designing practical solutions that work for them. That’s how we create lasting change.”

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Luby is director of the Center for Human and Planetary Health and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He’s also director of research at the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health. The Woods Institute provided early support for the brick kilns work through its Environmental Venture Projects grant program.