No matter how eco-conscious we try to be, it feels like single-use plastics are impossible to avoid in this world of blind consumerism. You can swap out snap-lock bags with re-usable containers, give up glad wrap and switch to BYO forks and metal straws but some single-use plastics are really difficult to work around due to costly and/or inaccessible alternatives.

When I moved to the UK, my biggest frustration was the amount of plastic used to package pre-weighed fruit and vegetables. Compared to supermarkets in Australia (which aren’t perfect by any means) it was absolutely atrocious. Every shopping trip left me anxious and angry. The alternative, finding unpackaged food, meant visiting multiple stores a week and often paying more. I still did it as much as possible, but there was a limit. It took less than a year before my frustration hit the roof and I started to explore ways to be more responsible about the single-use plastic I couldn’t avoid.

Then I found ecobricks!

Now, you may have heard of these before, but let me make one thing clear up front – the ecobricks you have heard of are not the logged, validated and cradle-to-cradle solution I’m talking about. Genuine ecobricks are a lot more than plastic stuffed into a plastic bottle.

What Are Ecobricks Then?

Well, you’ve got the basic concept: it is plastic stuffed into a bottle. But ecobricks need to meet a number of criteria before they can be considered a useful and sustainable building ‘brick’.

First off, the plastic it contains must be clean and dry. This is because any organic matter within the bottle can decompose, create carbon dioxide gas and eventually explode the brick. Dead ecobricks are a waste of time and good intentions.

Secondly, the amount of plastic within the bottle must reach a minimum density amounting to 0.33g/L of the bottle volume. This is for three key reasons:

• It limits the amount of oxygen in the bottle that will degrade any unavoidable organic matter to prevent that gaseous explosion mentioned above.
• Limiting the amount of oxygen also results in the brick being less of a fire hazard, and this density has been tested to be as fire-safe as most regular household furniture.
• Lastly, it ensures an approximate solidness to the brick in order for it to be structurally-sound to make things out of.

Achieving this density can be difficult when you are first getting used to the process, but it becomes much easier. My first brick met the required density only because I was well informed, had read up on useful tips and tricks and knew what I was getting into. Now my bricks are all over 0.50g/L. Unfortunately density is often a factor that people aren’t aware of ahead of making ecobricks or one they have the most difficulty with so it can put people off the process. But never fear, the effort is worth it!

Thirdly, the ecobrick must be logged and validated on the gobrik.com website. This process is very easy and it has a number of benefits:

• It provides each ecobrick with a unique identification number so that it can be identified in the future as a validated ecobrick.
• It enables you to track your progress and feel pride, to help build a lifestyle habit of ecobricking.
• Validated bricks are trusted bricks, so you can safely donate them to community projects and you have peace of mind that, handled correctly, it will survive hundreds of years.
• If you are building something with a specific type of brick, it enables you to send or exchange ecobricks for the ones you are after.
• By helping with the validating process, you earn credits which can then be exchanged for ecobrick courses or sustainable products.

And lastly, the ecobrick must be used in a way to ensure that the material will not degrade for the rest of its life. To do this, you need a plan. If you do not plan ahead or think through what will happen to your brick, the benefits of ecobricking are lost entirely.

Other Options

I’ll get back to ecobricks in a minute, but first I’m going to outline some facts about what happens to plastic so that you can understand the benefits of ecobricks. There are three places single-use plastic end up once we’re finished with them.

1. Into our waste disposal bin, where it may be fortunate enough to sit in landfill for decades if it hasn’t blown out of the bin or the truck into the environment, or it is sent to be incinerated.
2. Into the environment. From our streets, down drains, into waterways, left on beaches, left in parks… and you’ve seen the horrific images of what happens to our beautiful animals when they consume plastic, which happens all too often.
3. It gets recycled through your council curb-side recycling service or through schemes such as Terracycle or your supermarket collection bin. Only 9% of plastic since the 1950s has been recycled, with current rates worldwide averaging at about 14%. But guess what? Plastic recycling is a very flawed industry that we’ve been green-washed to believe is eco-friendly. More on that in a minute.

Plastic in landfill or the environment is exposed to the sun and heat. UV rays from the sun cause the plastic to break down into smaller and smaller pieces until they form macropastics and then microplastics. Macroplastics can still be litter-picked out of the environment if you are putting in a concerted effort, but microplastics are now too small to be collected – that plastic is now in our soil and our waterways forever, breaking down into plastic molecules.

You know that compostable plastic shopping bag you’re using? ‘Compostable’ or ‘bio-degradable’ just means it will break down into microplastics faster so that the bag won’t choke an animal. Yes, you’re saving turtles, but you’re also poisoning our environment quicker. Not so eco-friendly after all! Green-washing at work. *

* However, ‘bio-plastic’ is made entirely of plant-based resins that are safe to degrade in the environment (as opposed to regular petroleum-based resins). Only, it’s impossible to tell the difference so you can’t be sure that it is bio-plastic unless it explicitly says so! You’ll need to do some research. Also, there is a big difference between ‘home compostable’ and ‘compostable’, but that’s another topic… Back to the post!

Plastic molecules are also released when plastic is heated up, such as the sun bearing down on a snack packet in the park or (brace yourself) on that plastic drink bottle in your car. Have you ever noticed those car bottles become warm and soft and that the water tastes bad? You are drinking plastic molecules!

If the waste in your disposal bin is sent for incineration, the burning of plastic releases poisonous molecules into the air. Filtration systems would be needed to counter this, but plastic molecules are still being created and disposed of in one form or another.

Plastic molecules are now being drunk, eaten or breathed in by plants, animals and us. Here’s where it hits another level of scary. Plastic molecules emulate estrogen – a hormone that we all need to a certain extent, but too much can cause hormone imbalances, disease and cancer. Just sit with that for a moment… Hormone imbalances. Disease. Cancer. Pretty common health issues, right? And sometimes leathal. Well, plastic may be an underlying factor to it all!

Given this, it makes sense to want to ensure that our plastic is protected from UV, heat and incineration. We also want to make sure that it is trapped from ever entering waste streams or the environment and turning into plastic molecules!

Read more about plastic ‘sequestration’ including the background and science behind this approach.

Plastic Recycling

“Yeah, but recycling would ensure that!” I hear you say. Well, here’s some dirty little secrets about plastic recycling:

• Your plastic can only be recycled or, more accurately, ‘downcycled’ into a lower grade of plastic, and there’s a maximum of seven times this can happen. It cannot be endlessly recycled like other materials such as paper, glass and aluminium.
• Downcycling takes a lot of energy, requires virgin plastic and needs chemical softeners – it is not a clean process.
• It is a recycling ‘industry’ for a reason. Those recycling companies are in it for profit, so they focus their time and money on the two types of plastic that are the most profitable to recycle. And the rest? A surprising amount of it will end up in the bin anyway.
• Downcycled plastic is largely made into single-use items. The worldwide average time that a single-use item is used is 15 minutes.

Scenario 1: You have higher-grade single-use plastics that your council collects. The recycling plant can only downcycle these into a lower grade of plastic which is likely single-use. They use power + plastic + chemicals to make something new which get’s used for 15 minutes and then there’s a 14% chance it gets recycled again. More likely, it ends up in waste streams or the environment and turns into toxic microplastics. Was your recycling effort and that feel-good feeling worth it for a 15 minute delay that cost resources and materials?

Scenario 2: Your supermarket collects plastic to recycle and you diligently place a pile of it in their designated bin. Only, someone else threw a whole lot of the wrong plastic in, and a kid eating an apple throws his core in there too. Do you think that the supermarket staff are paid to sort through it all? No! They will bin it. And if they don’t bin it, it will go to a recycler who doesn’t see that plastic as profitable. If they recycle it, it will become a packet to be used for 15 minutes and then, once again, you’re relying on someone else to recycle it. That’s a lot of uncertainties.

Do you still feel confident that you are saving the world by recycling your plastic? I most certainly do NOT!

Terracycle

Let me quickly touch on Terracycle. This option seems to be taking the western world by storm, but this is still just a recycling system with Terracycle as the middle man. Terracycle break down the items into a usable raw material (such as plastic pellets), but they don’t make the new products themselves. Terracycle get money from:

1. The brands that created the products, to run recycling programs and make them look eco-conscious (and the financial gains from this eco-image outweigh the cost of the programs, so it’s really just clever advertising).
2. Individuals and businesses that pay TerraCycle for a Zero Waste Box for a specific type of product to be collected.
3. The companies buying the materials from them.

That’s three sources of income to please their shareholders. Yes, there is a system to collect points from using TerraCycle services which can then be converted into donations for charities, but these charity donations are funded by the sponsored brands, not by TerraCycle, although it does give TerraCycle and the brands plenty of free advertising and more profit themselves.

The material TerraCycles produce may be used in some very cool recycled products, such as shoes, backpacks, tables, plant pots and pens, but these products require virgin plastic and chemicals to make, they will wear out and hence they have a limited lifespan. At the end of the day, TerraCycle and the brands using this system are taking advantage of a short term solution in order to make a profit.

The Best Solution

The best solution is not ecobricking. Did I surprise you there? Of course, the very best option is actually not to buy single-use plastic in the first place! Duh. Avoid plastics, limit your consumption as much as possible, and re-use whatever you can. But what about the single-use plastics you can’t feasibly avoid?

The Imperfect but Better Solution

Remember, the end goal here is to sequester plastic in order to prevent microplastics and toxic plastic molecules entering the environment. We essentially need to trap the plastic in something that will keep it locked up for as long as possible, until a more eco-friendly option than plastic downcycling comes along. Human beings are pretty ingenious when they want to be and they are becoming more and more environmentally conscious too. I don’t think it would be too hard to believe that humans could invent an eco-friendly solution to the plastic problem within the next 100 years, right? Sure, sounds reasonable! But let’s give them about 450 years, just in case.

No, I didn’t just pick a random number there. It just so happens that your typical plastic bottle will take about 450 years to break down. Let’s take advantage of that! By stuffing plastics into a bottle, we are protecting that plastic from entering waste streams or the environment and preventing it from breaking down into plastic molecules for 450 years. This is something that no other options, not even plastic recycling, can achieve!

But, our bottle also needs to be handled correctly for it to last all of those 450 years, and a correctly made ecobrick is obviously going to survive a lot longer than its maker. That is why it’s so important to have a validated ecobrick, have a long term plan, and to be part of a long-term movement of ecobrickers who think ahead.

The Ecobricks.org website outlines the types of ecobrick building styles that are approved and will ensure that your ecobrick will survive as long as possible. The key factors are that any building technique can be reversed without damaging the bottle! A damaged ecobrick cannot be re-used, but an intact ecobrick can. And if everything you build with an ecobrick with can be torn down to be rebuilt, then your ecobrick can be used and re-used for 450 years! The two options are: modules and earth buildings.

Modules are an indoors-only option, as the surface of the ecobricks are left exposed so must be kept away from light and heat. The bricks can be joined together using silicone or sliced motorcycle inner tubes to build tessellating shapes that can form stools, chairs, stands, tables, be used to build horizontally to form platforms or vertically to form towers!

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Earth buildings use bricks covered and protected by cob – a natural material that will be strong enough to form a structure, but can also be torn down and completely reused without damaging the ecobricks. In this way, ecobricks are a cradle-to-cradle design, able to be 100% reused endlessly for the 450 year life of the bottles.

Other benefits of ecobricking include:

• The process of making ecobricks is not fun. It is HARD. Hence, it encourages you to reconsider every piece of plastic you are buying and try to work out ways to avoid it. It is an excellent motivator for reducing single-use plastic in your life.
• It makes you personally responsible for your waste. In our culture, it is so easy to pass our waste on, to throw it in a bin, and forget all about it. By throwing it away, we are avoiding accountability for the amount of waste we create and the impact it has. Through ecobricking we are becoming personally accountable for our plastic use and it’s impact on the world.
• You can be 100% certain of what happens to your plastic. As I’ve described above, you can’t be certain about what will happen to your waste or recycling, but you can be certain about what will happen to your ecobricks in your lifetime and as part of the ecobrick movement after that.
• Ecobricking is taking advantage of all the positive aspects of plastic, such as being durable, light, colourful and water-resistant. Instead of being waste, we are turning it into a useful material!

The Naysayers

There are some very common misconceptions about ecobricking. Let’s address them here.

Naysayer: It’s not a long term solution like recycling.

No, it’s not a long term solution, and it does rely on waiting for a better processing system within the next 450 years. But, as we’ve seen, plastic recycling is not all it’s cracked up to be. Recycling single-use plastics succeeds in creating a 15 min delay, while ecobricks are a 450-year capsule of plastic that can be easily retrieved for that better system.

Naysayer: All it’s doing is allowing you to buy plastic, as long as it goes into a bottle.

Anyone who says that has not ecobricked. They have not frowned at the bag of vegetables, imagining the effort of washing, drying, cutting and stuffing that damned bag. As I’ve said, one of the major benefits of ecobricking is that it is a motivator to reduce plastic consumption.

Naysayer: Once the bottle breaks, all that plastic is going to be released anyway.

A correctly made and used ecobrick will not break. That is why it is so important to read, understand and follow the steps to make a genuine ecobrick and then to care and use it correctly.

Naysayer: It’s too hard to reach the weight density. I’ll just make my own lighter ecobricks without logging them.

By not reaching that density, your bricks may be a fire hazard, may explode from gasses, or may be crushed and damaged. It will not survive 450 years. Unless someone salvages that plastic to re-brick it, that plastic will end up in waste streams or the environment within a lifetime and your efforts will be wasted. In addition, it cannot be donated to a large-scale ecobrick community building project so the use of that brick, while it survives, is very limited.

Naysayer: I don’t want to use cob, I’ll make my walls with concrete.

Concrete sticks to the plastic of the bottle. Eventually your house will have other owners, and those owners may tear those walls down. They will demolish the concrete which will rip your ecobricks apart and, once again, all that effort is wasted. Plus, the point of ecobricks is to store plastic until a better option is found. If they are buried in concrete, how will they be retrieved?

Naysayer: I don’t collect enough plastic to build an ecobrick.

Fantastic!! That is amazing! However, any bottle you start bricking is going to last 450 years, so you can fill it over years and years. Every single piece of plastic that isn’t going into waste streams or the environment means less toxic plastic molecules in our environment.

Naysayer: There is too much plastic to bottle up for when a better processing option is available. It’s not good enough.

Maybe so. However, every little bit will add up. Plus, you’d be surprised how much plastic can fit in one bottle once it is cut up and pushed down enough to reach the correct density. The tightly packed plastic inside a 1L bottle could originally have filled about 5 pillowcases!

Naysayer: I have SO much clean plastic saved, but don’t have the time to ecobrick!

That’s OK! You’ve started on your journey to becoming more aware of your plastic consumption, and that’s great. But don’t look at your pile of plastic as you’ll easily become overwhelmed! Concentrate firstly on reducing your plastic consumption, and secondly on starting a new habit.

Grab one handful and ecobrick that this week (and bin the rest if it is causing anxiety). Maybe next week you’ll have time for two handfuls! Each little you do adds up, and as you build the habit you’ll find ways to make the process easier and ecobrick more (while also consuming less). The most important thing is to read the guidance and to make a start.

Naysayer: There aren’t any community projects in my area. I don’t want to keep them, so they’ll just end up in the bin anyway.

I completely appreciate that this mindset of passing on our ‘waste’ for someone else to handle is really ingrained in our society and difficult to break free from. Instead, try to feel empowered by taking full responsibility for your plastic. Sit with the idea for a bit and think outside the box for ways to use your bricks yourself that you can take pride in. They don’t take up that much space!

You’ll find ideas online such as footstools, plant stands, kids chairs, coffee tables, garden edges, cob walls, planters, giant lego, and much more! You can also decorate ecobricks so they are completely disguised in your home, or make them with coloured plastic to be their own decoration.

If you really really want to donate them, there are a couple of collectors in the UK who accept validated bricks through the post to store them for their own projects and community projects elsewhere. But I’m not going to make it easy for you – you’ll have to get involved in the community and find these ecobrick angels yourself.

So, You Want To Start Ecobricking?

Great! Here’s the best way to get started:

Step One: Head to www.ecobricks.org and start reading through the ‘Ecobricks’ drop down tab of pages. I can’t explain the process any better than they do. My advice would be to read their information thoroughly before beginning so as to avoid common mistakes.

Step Two: Join one of their brilliant Ecobrick Starter Workshops, either in person or online. This will run through all the important information, how to make an ecobrick and how to start building with them. For more information, head to GEA Trainings

Step Three: Join the Ecobricks UK page (even if you aren’t in the UK). The people who run and are part of this page are a wealth of information and will help with any questions. Seeing other people’s work will inspire you, motivate you, and provide some community benefit too! When you join, be sure to read their information first as this will answer many of the common questions. Also, reading through the posts you will see many of the common problems and be able to use people’s responses to find a solution for your process or your bricks.

Step Four: Head to gobrik.org website and create an account.

Step Five: Start making ecobricks and logging them!

If you have any questions, please comment below and I’ll do my best to answer and/or redirect you to more informative resources.

Happy Ecobricking 🙂

References

• The Economist, 3rd March 2018, ‘The environment – The known unknowns of plastic pollution’ available here
• United Nations Environment Programme, 2018, Singe-use Plastics: A Roadmap for Sustainability available here
• Ecobricks.org, ‘Plastic: The Long Story: Understanding the ancient history of plastic is essential to putting it to good use today’ available here