In this paper, the thermal behavior of hollow clay bricks made up of paper waste has been studied and their thermal performance has been optimized. On the one hand, both strength and thermal properties of different paper waste concentrations have been obtained by means of laboratory tests. Thermal conductivity of the microporous brick materials with additives produced in this study reduced from 0.68 W/m K to 0.39 W/m K compared with that of the sample without additives. On the other hand, the finite element method (FEM) has been applied to the nonlinear numerical thermal analysis of three different hollow bricks, including radiation and convection phenomena inside holes. Next, using the design of experiments (DOE) over the FEM models, several parameters such as the material conductivity, the convection and radiation properties and the mean brick temperature have been studied. In general, the thermal resistance is a nonlinear function that depends on the geometry of the recesses, the material properties and the temperature distribution. In all analyzed cases, minimizing the material thermal conductivity of bricks and decreasing the recesses surface radiation emissivity caused a lower thermal transmittance in the brick. Finally, the most important conclusions and the main findings of this research are exposed. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.