Social [Plastic Waste] Startup turns trash into construction-grade building blocks

Arkain2K

Si vis pacem, para bellum
@Steel
Joined
Dec 6, 2010
Messages
33,409
Reaction score
5,663
This is a serious topic of discussion for grown-ups who can read, comprehend, and think before posting.

If that's beyond your capabilities, please move along to other threads more suitable for your level, for there is no room for shit-posters at this adult round-table. Thank you.
For the longest time, I believed that the recyclable materials we drops off at the local recycling centers would be taken to recycling plants in our own states, melt down, magically turns into new products that would make Captain Planet proud.

I was deceived. As were you.

As it turns out, we only cherry-pick somewhere between 5% to 10% of the highest-quality stuff that's easiest to recycle with maximum returns. The rest are crushed into giant cubes about the size of your bedroom, shoved into shipping containers, and sent off to Asia on huge cargo ships. What happens to them next is no longer our concern.

For the record, we don't bother dealing with those low-quality recyclables not because we don't have the technology or know-how, but simply because it would cost us WAY less in labor, raw material, and energy to simply produce new materials rather than recycling old materials.

Recycling companies in China/Indonesia/Malaysia/Philippines/Vietnam then recycles what they can, and dump the rest of the contaminated and non-recycleables where ever they can, much of which usually ends up in the ocean.

Well, that sweet deal is now coming to an end, and the West has just awakened to the new reality: we'll now have to deal with our own plastic waste.

----

Thread Index:

 
Last edited:
Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not
Plastics and papers from dozens of American cities and towns are being dumped in landfills after China stopped recycling most “foreign garbage.”
By Livia Albeck-Ripka | May 29, 2018

13cli-recycling-facility-articleLarge.jpg

Bales of recyclable waste in Seattle. American waste managers are struggling to find plants to process their recyclables.
Oregon is serious about recycling. Its residents are accustomed to dutifully separating milk cartons, yogurt containers, cereal boxes and kombucha bottles from their trash to divert them from the landfill. But this year, because of a far-reaching rule change in China, some of the recyclables are ending up in the local dump anyway.

In recent months, in fact, thousands of tons of material left curbside for recycling in dozens of American cities and towns — including several in Oregon — have gone to landfills.

In the past, the municipalities would have shipped much of their used paper, plastics and other scrap materials to China for processing. But as part of a broad antipollution campaign, China announced last summer that it no longer wanted to import “foreign garbage.” Since Jan. 1 it has banned imports of various types of plastic and paper, and tightened standards for materials it does accept.

While some waste managers already send their recyclable materials to be processed domestically, or are shipping more to other countries, others have been unable to find a substitute for the Chinese market. “All of a sudden, material being collected on the street doesn’t have a place to go,” said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, one of the largest waste managers in the country.

China’s stricter requirements also mean that loads of recycling are more likely to be considered contaminated if they contain materials that are not recyclable. That has compounded a problem that waste managers call wishful or aspirational recycling: people setting aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren’t.

In the Pacific Northwest, Republic has diverted more than 2,000 tons of paper to landfills since the Chinese ban came into effect, Mr. Keller said. The company has been unable to move that material to a market “at any price or cost,” he said. Though Republic is dumping only a small portion of its total inventory so far — the company handles over five million tons of recyclables nationwide each year — it sent little to no paper to landfills last year.

But for smaller companies, like Rogue Disposal and Recycling, which serves much of Oregon, the Chinese ban has upended operations. Rogue sent all its recycling to landfills for the first few months of the year, said Garry Penning, a spokesman.

13cli-recycling-facility2-jumbo-v4.jpg

Western states, which have relied the most on Chinese recycling plants, have been hit especially hard. In some areas — like Eugene, Ore., and parts of Idaho, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii — local officials and garbage haulers will no longer accept certain items for recycling, in some cases refusing most plastics, glass and certain types of paper. Instead, they say, customers should throw these items in the trash.

Theresa Byrne, who lives in Salem, Ore., said the city took too long to inform residents that most plastics and egg and milk cartons were now considered garbage. “I was angry,” she said. “I believe in recycling.”

Other communities, like Grants Pass, Ore., home to about 37,000 people, are continuing to encourage their residents to recycle as usual, but the materials are winding up in landfills anyway. Local waste managers said they were concerned that if they told residents to stop recycling, it could be hard to get them to start again.

It is “difficult with the public to turn the spigot on and off,” said Brian Fuller, a waste manager with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

The fallout has spread beyond the West Coast. Ben Harvey, the president of E.L. Harvey & Sons, a recycling company based in Westborough, Mass., said that he had around 6,000 tons of paper and cardboard piling up, when he would normally have a couple hundred tons stockpiled. The bales are filling almost half of his 80,000-square-foot facility.

“It’s really impacted our day-to-day operations,” Mr. Harvey said. “It’s stifling me.”

Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled to find alternatives.

Still, across much of the United States, including most major cities, recycling is continuing as usual. Countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are importing more of the materials that are not processed domestically. And some waste companies have responded to China’s ban by stockpiling material while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy.

13cli-recycling-route-superJumbo.jpg

Republic Services collecting recycled materials in Kent, Wash.​


Americans recycle roughly 66 million tons of material each year, according to the most recent figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, about one-third of which is exported. The majority of those exports once went to China, said David Biderman, the executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, a research and advocacy group.

But American scrap exports to China fell by about 35 percent in the first two months of this year, after the ban was implemented, said Joseph Pickard, chief economist for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade group.

“It’s a huge concern, because China has just been such a dominant overseas market for us,” Mr. Pickard said.

In particular, exports of scrap plastic to China, valued at more than $300 million in 2015, totaled just $7.6 million in the first quarter of this year, down 90 percent from a year earlier, Mr. Pickard said. Other countries have stepped in to accept more plastics, but total scrap plastic exports are still down by 40 percent this year, he said.

“There is a significant disruption occurring to U.S. recycling programs,” Mr. Biderman said. “The concern is if this is the new normal.”

Curbside recycling is typically hauled by a private company to a sorting plant, where marketable goods are separated out. Companies or local governments then sell the goods to domestic or overseas processors. Some states and cities prohibit these companies from dumping plastic, paper and cardboard, but some local officials — including in Oregon, Massachusetts and various municipalities in Washington State — have granted waivers so that unmarketable materials can be sent to the landfill.

Recycling companies “used to get paid” by selling off recyclable materials, said Peter Spendelow, a policy analyst for the Department of Environmental Quality in Oregon. “Now they’re paying to have someone take it away.”

In some places, including parts of Idaho, Maine and Pennsylvania, waste managers are continuing to recycle but are passing higher costs on to customers, or are considering doing so.

“There are some states and some markets where mixed paper is at a negative value,” said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling at Waste Management, which handles 10 million tons of recycling per year. “We’ll let our customers make that decision, if they’d like to pay more and continue to recycle or to pay less and have it go to landfill.”


13cli-recycling-facility3-superJumbo.jpg

Mr. Spendelow said companies in rural areas, which tend to have higher expenses to get their materials to market, were being hit particularly hard. “They’re literally taking trucks straight to the landfill,” he said.

Will Posegate, the chief operations officer for Garten Services, which processes recycling for a number of counties in Oregon, said his company had tried to stockpile recyclables but eventually used a waiver to dump roughly 900 tons. “The warehouse builds up so much that it’s unsafe,” he said.

In California, officials are concerned that improperly stored bales of paper could become hazards during wildfire season, said Zoe Heller, the policy director for the state’s recycling department.

While China has entirely banned 24 materials, including post-consumer plastic and mixed paper, it has also demanded that other materials, such as cardboard and scrap metal, be only 0.5 percent impure. Even a small amount of food scraps or other rubbish, if undetected, can ruin a batch of recycling.

Some waste managers say that China’s new contamination standards are impossible to meet, while others are trying to clean up their recycling streams by slowing down their processing facilities, limiting the types of materials they accept or trying to better educate customers on what belongs in the recycling bin.


13cli-recycling-facility4-superJumbo.jpg

Waste traveling along a conveyor belt to be sorted​


Mr. Bell, the Waste Management executive, said he had seen everything from Christmas lights to animal carcasses to artillery shells come through the company’s recycling facilities. “Most of our facilities get a bowling ball every day or two,” he said.

Some materials can ruin a load, he said, while others pose fire or health hazards and can force facilities to slow their operations and in some cases temporarily shut down. (And a bowling ball could do serious damage to the equipment.) Approximately 25 percent of all recycling picked up by Waste Management is contaminated to the point that it is sent to landfills, Mr. Bell said.

Recyclers have always disposed of some of their materials. But the percentage has climbed as China and other buyers of recyclable material have ratcheted up quality standards.

Most contamination, Mr. Bell said, happens when people try to recycle materials they shouldn’t. Disposable coffee cups — which are usually lined with a thin film that makes them liquid-proof but challenging and expensive to reprocess — are an example. Unwashed plastics can also cause contamination.

“If we don’t get it clean, we’re not going to be able to market it, and if we can’t market it unfortunately it’s going to go to the landfill,” said Mr. Penning, the Rogue spokesman. In March, Rogue told customers to put everything in the trash except for corrugated cardboard, milk jugs, newspapers and tin and aluminum cans, which the company is finding domestic markets for, Mr. Penning said.

Rogue customers who make mistakes might see an “Oops” sticker the next time they check their recycling bin, he said.

In Eugene, similar restrictions have been imposed by the waste company Sanipac. These have not sat well with some residents. “Eugene is a very green city and people love their recycling here,” said Diane Peterson, a resident. “There are a lot of things like yogurt containers that we get all the time, and now we can’t recycle them.”

Leah Geocaris, another Eugene resident, said the change had prompted her to try to consume less overall. “On the one hand, I hate it, because I don’t want stuff to end up in landfill,” she said. “On the other hand, it’s a wake-up call.”

“Recycling is the third R,” she said. “You have to reduce and reuse first.”



 
Last edited:

EU proposes ban on plastic straws and other single-use plastic products
By Raf Casert, The Associated Press | May 28, 2018​
image.jpg

BRUSSELS -- The European Union has proposed banning plastic products like cotton buds, straws, stirs and balloon sticks when alternatives are easily available in an attempt to reduce litter spoiling beaches and ocean beds.

The European Commission said its proposal would seek to cut marine litter in half for the ten most prominent items and avoid environmental damage estimated at over $250 billion over the next dozen years.

EU Vice-President Frans Timmermans said that utensils would not be banned completely, but steps would be taken to have them made out of sustainable materials when possible.

"You can still organize a pick-nick, drink a cocktail and clean your ears just like before," Timmermans said.

He also made new proposals to ensure that it is the polluter that pays.

The proposal will be assessed by the EU parliament and member states but Timmermans hopes to see results before May 2019.

And unlike so many EU proposals that are immediately criticized by consumer and environmental groups as too little too late, the reaction was largely positive on Monday.

"The only way to stop plastics pouring into our oceans is to turn off the flow at its source: production," said Lasse Gustavsson, the European executive director of the environmental group Oceana, as he lauded the initiative.

European Green Party lawmaker Monica Frassoni also welcomed the initiative and added that "the scale of the problem means that we cannot rely on individual European countries to take action and must instead find a Europe-wide response."

The European Parliament has said that plastics production is now 20 times higher than in 1960s.

The EU has also been spurred into action by China's decision to no longer import part of the bloc's waste.



Sea Turtles with plastic straws up their noses say "It's about damn time, littering humans!"
 
Last edited:
Fucking assholes are trying to limit the lives of their citizens further and further.
 
Good. Plastic, especially single use plastic, is a cancer to the natural world and in turn, to our health. There's not a lot that I find more depressing than going to a beach/river and seeing plastic crap all over the place.

However, even though this is a good idea (why'd we wait so long?) I'm not sure if it's going to be sufficient at all. Microplastics might be a bigger problem long term than larger chunks.
 
Hopefully this will be the last straw for EU's tyranny...
 

To be fair, the "least polluting countries" on the list achieve their sterling ranks by exporting their trash to the "most polluting countries".

That practice will soon come to an end, and is the driving force behind this ban proposal.


Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling
By Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura | Jan. 11, 2018



LONDON — Ever since China announced last year that it no longer wanted to be the “world’s garbage dump,” recycling about half of the globe’s plastics and paper products, Western nations have been puzzling over what to do when the ban went into effect, which it did on Jan. 1.

The answer, to date, in Britain at least, is nothing. At least one waste disposal site in London is already seeing a buildup of plastic recyclables and has had to pay to have some of it removed.

Similar backups have been reported in Canada, Ireland, Germany and several other European nations, while tons of rubbish is piling up in port cities like Hong Kong.

Steve Frank, of Pioneer Recycling in Oregon, owns two plants that collect and sort 220,000 tons of recyclable materials each year. A majority of it was until recently exported to China.

“My inventory is out of control,” he said.

China’s ban, Mr. Frank said, has caused “a major upset of the flow of global recyclables.” Now, he said, he is hoping to export waste to countries like Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Malaysia — “anywhere we can” — but “they can’t make up the difference.”

In Britain, Jacqueline O’Donovan, managing director of the British waste disposal firm, O’Donovan Waste Disposal, said that “the market has completely changed” since China’s decision went into effect. Her company collects and disposes of about 70,000 tons of plastic trash every year, she said, and expects “huge bottlenecks across the whole of England” in the coming months.

Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, pledged on Thursday to eliminate avoidable wastes within 25 years. In a prepared speech, she urged supermarkets to introduce plastic-free aisles where all the food is loose.

The European Union, for its part, plans to propose a tax on plastic bags and packaging, citing the China ban and the health of the oceans among other reasons.

Those measures might help ease the situation some day, but for now Britain is faced with growing piles of recyclables and no place to put them. Experts say the immediate response to the crisis may well be to turn to incineration or landfills — both harmful to the environment.

China’s ban covers imports of 24 kinds of solid waste, including unsorted paper and the low-grade polyethylene terephthalate used in plastic bottles, as part of a broad cleanup effort and a campaign against “yang laji,” or “foreign garbage.” It also sets new limits on the levels of impurities in other recyclables.

China had been processing at least half of the world’s exports of waste paper, metals and used plastic — 7.3 million tons in 2016, according to recent industry data. Last July, China notified the World Trade Organization that it intended to ban some imports of trash, saying the action was needed to protect the environment and improve public health.

“Large amounts of dirty wastes or even hazardous wastes are mixed in the solid waste that can be used as raw materials,” Beijing wrote to the W.T.O. “This polluted China’s environment seriously.”

Chinese officials also complained that much of the recyclable material the country received from overseas had not been properly cleaned or was mixed with non-recyclable materials.

The sudden move has left Western countries scrambling to deal with a buildup of plastic and paper garbage while looking for new markets for the waste.

“It’s not just a U.K. problem,” said Simon Ellin, chief executive of the Recycling Association in Britain. “The rest of the world is thinking, ‘What can we do?’ It’s tough times.”

In Halifax, Nova Scotia, which sent 80 percent of its recycling to China, Matthew Keliher, the city’s manager of solid waste, said he had largely found alternatives to accept plastic, except for the low-grade plastic film that is used to make shopping bags and for wrapping. Stockpiles of those plastics have so exceeded the city’s storage capacity that Halifax had to get special permission to bury about 300 metric tons of the material in a landfill.

In Calgary, Alberta, which sent 50 percent of its plastics and 100 percent of its mixed papers to China, the material has been stockpiled in empty storage sheds, shipping containers, trailers and warehouses since last fall. So far, 5,000 tons has been collected, Sharon Howland, the city’s lead manager of waste and recycling services, told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

“The material are a sellable resource, so we will store them as long as we can and evaluate our options from there,” she said.

In Britain, even the political class appeared caught by surprise. When asked in front of lawmakers about the impending ban last month, Environment Secretary Michael Gove fumbled: “I don’t know what impact it will have. It is something to which — I will be completely honest — I have not given sufficient thought.”

Pollution from plastics has captured global attention in recent years. A new David Attenborough series on the BBC, “Blue Planet II,” has shown plastic bags and bottles clogging oceans and killing fish, turtles and other marine wildlife, prompting governments to put in place more stringent rules.

Every year, Britain sends China enough recyclables to fill up 10,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, according to Greenpeace U.K. The United States exports more than 13.2 million tons of scrap paper and 1.42 million tons of scrap plastics annually to China, the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries has reported. That is the sixth-largest American export to China.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-ban.html
 
Last edited:
To be fair, the "least polluting countries" on the list achieve their stirling rank by exporting their trash to the "most polluting countries".

That practice will soon come to an end, and is the driving force behind this ban proposal.


Plastics Pile Up as China Refuses to Take the West’s Recycling
By Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura | Jan. 11, 2018

merlin_131863700_1975c292-ab02-4536-8dcb-299d9c622576-articleLarge.jpg

Officials in Britain and the West are scrambling to cope with growing piles of plastics like this one in China.
Beijing banned the import of many recyclables on Jan.1.



https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/world/china-recyclables-ban.html
It's good that Chine takes such measures and as @tonni wrote, it's about time the EU acts on this issue!
 
Went to a McDonalds yesterday. No straws. Just a sign "PLEASE ASK FOR STRAWS AT THE COUNTER".

Cba at all.
 
California has a recycling crisis.
The only way to solve it is to stop making so much trash

By The Times Editorial Board | May 26, 2018

XMWVZS723ZHPRGTUC2RPAYINDQ.jpg

Californians use — and then toss — a tremendous amount of paper and plastic packaging material every day: takeout coffee cups and lids, cereal boxes, wine bottles, plastic bags, clamshell food containers, and on and on.

It's hard for even the most militant environmentalist to avoid contributing to this waste stream, given the inescapability of products wrapped in some sort of disposable material. Even fruits and vegetables that are naturally encased in durable, compostable wrapping will be trundled up in plastic bags in the produce aisle for the trip home.

Those disturbed by the amount of trash they produce have been able to assuage their guilty consciences by making sure every potential recyclable item ended up in the blue recycling bin. Surely there could be no long-term environmental toll if every empty plastic soda bottle and chipboard six-pack carrier was diverted from the landfill and remade into a cozy fleece jacket or an organic chemistry textbook.

What a lovely story. Too bad it's about as true as a happily-ever-after fairy tale. Recycling has never been the solution to the problem posed by empty beer cans, plastic takeout containers and other single-use items, just a way to mitigate the effects enough to pretend that all this waste is not really wasteful. But reality is becoming harder to ignore now that the foreign market for our trash is collapsing. Hallelujah to that, as it might just be the impetus needed to force society to confront the disposable culture that is trashing the planet.

And we owe it all to China. Up until just a few weeks ago, China was the single largest market for the world's recyclables. About two-thirds of the yogurt cups, soda bottles and magazines tucked into curbside recycling bins and crushed into bales were loaded onto cargo ships bound for China and other countries, where they were remanufactured into shiny new products and shipped back to the U.S. But China has its own refuse to worry about, and officials there announced last year that they no longer wanted to import the world's trash, especially the plastic kind. Then in May, China temporarily shut down all imports of recyclable material and warned that it would impose tough, permanent restrictions by the end of the year. The U.S. and other nations are still scrambling to figure out what to do with the rapidly growing trash bottleneck.

While Vietnam, Indonesia and some other countries still buy recyclable materials, there's no market on the scale of China. Meanwhile, bales of mixed paper (cereal boxes, junk mail and the like) and plastics are piling up in warehouses up and down the state. If a buyer can't be found soon, the bales will probably have to be taken to landfills to make room for the next wave of paper and plastic because the U.S. doesn't have the remanufacturing facilities to process it here.

It's a crisis, certainly. But it's also an opportunity to enact meaningful, and necessary, policies that would otherwise face too much public resistance. Even before this development, California's recycling rate (that is, the percentage of recyclable material that didn't get tossed in landfills) was on the wane, down from a high of 50% in 2014 to 44% in 2016.

Trash haulers and other waste management officials in California are starting the conversation on stop-gap measures such as educating consumers to do a better job recycling. They are talking about longer-term approaches as well, such as building plants in the state to use recycled materials and putting pressure on manufacturers to share responsibility for the cost of the waste their products become.

But while these proposals are worthy of discussion, they are simply not sufficient to solve the problem. The real solution — the long-term solution — is not to improve our recycling process, but to reduce our reliance on disposable items.

Earlier this year, we urged the state's leaders to start working on comprehensive plans to reduce the use of plastic (which is found in many disposable items and doesn't biodegrade — all of the plastic ever made still exists in the environment somewhere, usually broken into tiny bits). Sadly, there has yet to be any real action on this front. Even fairly minor proposals to cut plastic waste, such as by requiring the lids of disposable plastic beverage bottles to be tethered on and by barring restaurants from handing out plastic straws unless a customer asks for one, have generated fierce backlash.

With the recycling market breaking down and trash piling up, there's no more time to waste. Policymakers and consumers should step up and take the hard but necessary steps to deal with our out-of-control trash-generating culture.



Then I found out that most countries in the West don't even recycle their shit at all. They have been relying on China to recycle their trash for so damn long, their governments are scrambling now because they don't know what to do with their growing mountains of plastic wastes.
 
Last edited:
It's incredible what we do to our environment.

enhanced-24034-1460711481-10.jpg
 
Went to a McDonalds yesterday. No straws. Just a sign "PLEASE ASK FOR STRAWS AT THE COUNTER".

Cba at all.

Drinking through a straw is good for your teeth and can help prevent cavities if you are drinking cola/sprite etc.
 
EU proposes ban on straws, other single-use plastics
Raf Casert, The Associated Press | May 28, 2018

image.jpg

BRUSSELS -- The European Union has proposed banning plastic products like cotton buds, straws, stirs and balloon sticks when alternatives are easily available in an attempt to reduce litter spoiling beaches and ocean beds.

The European Commission said its proposal would seek to cut marine litter in half for the ten most prominent items and avoid environmental damage estimated at over $250 billion over the next dozen years.

EU Vice-President Frans Timmermans said that utensils would not be banned completely, but steps would be taken to have them made out of sustainable materials when possible.

"You can still organize a pick-nick, drink a cocktail and clean your ears just like before," Timmermans said.

He also made new proposals to ensure that it is the polluter that pays.

The proposal will be assessed by the EU parliament and member states but Timmermans hopes to see results before May 2019.

And unlike so many EU proposals that are immediately criticized by consumer and environmental groups as too little too late, the reaction was largely positive on Monday.

"The only way to stop plastics pouring into our oceans is to turn off the flow at its source: production," said Lasse Gustavsson, the European executive director of the environmental group Oceana, as he lauded the initiative.

European Green Party lawmaker Monica Frassoni also welcomed the initiative and added that "the scale of the problem means that we cannot rely on individual European countries to take action and must instead find a Europe-wide response."

The European Parliament has said that plastics production is now 20 times higher than in 1960s. The EU has also been spurred into action by China's decision to no longer import part of the bloc's waste.



Sea Turtles say thanks:



I support this.

For fucks sake, make them out of bamboo or hemp or something. I will pay 25 cents more.
 
It's incredible what we do to our environment.

enhanced-24034-1460711481-10.jpg

Individually retail-packaged banana!? Oh that's just fucked up. :eek:

I'm assuming that's a British thing? The "p" is for "pence"?
 
Last edited:
For the longest time, I believe in the fairy tale that ALL the recyclable materials we drops off at the recycling centers would be taken care of at a recycling plants in our own states, and magically turns into new products that would make Captain Planet proud.

As it turns out, we only cherry-pick the highest-quality stuff that's easiest to recycle with maximum returns. The rest are crushed into giant cubes and off on a cargo ship to China, because it cost us way less in labor, raw material, and energy to just produce new stuff rather than to recycling old stuff. That was very disappointing.

Then I found out that Europe don't even recycle their shit.


California has a recycling crisis.
The only way to solve it is to stop making so much trash

By The Times Editorial Board | May 26, 2018
XMWVZS723ZHPRGTUC2RPAYINDQ.jpg



http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-recycling-crisis-20180526-story.html

I have a good friend who is doing an econ PHD who made me see the light with green initiatives...

Stuff like landfill - sounds fucking terrible but if you think about it, if you live in a country like australia finding a patch of land to dig a fucking huge hole to fill with crap, is far more green than shipping recycling bins off to china.

In terms of environmentalism, the saying goes there are no right answers, only trade offs.
 
I have a good friend who is doing an econ PHD who made me see the light with green initiatives...

Stuff like landfill - sounds fucking terrible but if you think about it, if you live in a country like australia finding a patch of land to dig a fucking huge hole to fill with crap, is far more green than shipping recycling bins off to china.

In terms of environmentalism, the saying goes there are no right answers, only trade offs.

The latest idea is turning plastics and rubber into bricks.

Imagine how many low-cost shelters can be build with the millions tons of recyclables that China no longer takes.

They're doing it now in Colombia for a refugees center. A complete house with two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a bathroom, and a kitchen can be put together like giant lego pieces by four people in five days and cost less than $7000.

If these pre-fab houses reach mass-production rates, we can say goodbye to all those flimsy canvas tents that usually pops up whenever a massive amount of refugees run away from war, or after a major natural disaster (like earthquake or tsunami) that renders an entire community homeless.


This House was Built in 5 Days Using Recycled Plastic Bricks
by Nicolás Valencia | May 1, 2017​



Ten years ago when Colombian Fernando Llanos tried to build his own house in Cundinamarca, he realized that moving the materials from Bogota was going to be very difficult. After mulling it over, he decided to build his house out of plastic, and after a series of trials and errors, he ended up meeting architect Óscar Méndez, who developed his thesis on the same subject, and together they founded the company Conceptos Plásticos (Plastic Concepts) in 2011.

The innovative local company managed to patent its system of bricks and pillars made of recycled plastic, which is then put together like Lego pieces in a construction system that lets you build houses up to two stories high in five days.

Instead of using brand new plastic, they decided to give plastic that has already been thrown away a second chance at life, keeping in mind that on average it takes 300 years for it to completely degrade. "Working with new plastic is simple," explained Óscar Méndez to the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, "because there are defined parameters, but used (plastic) requires more experimentation.”

The base material they work with is obtained from popular recyclers and factories that discard tons of plastic daily. Using an extrusion process, the plastic is melted and emptied into a final mold, creating a three-kilo brick (6.6 lbs), similar to clay ones with the same dimensions. When assembled under pressure, the bricks insulate heat and have additives that retard combustion. Additionally, they are thermoacoustic and earthquake-resistance is up to code for Colombia, taking into account the country’s high levels of seismic activity.

With a final cost of 20 million Colombian pesos (about USD 6,800) per unit, the company had the help of four people to build a 40 square meter house with two bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a bathroom and a kitchen in only five days.


In their meteoric rise, a major milestone for this small company (with less than 15 employees) was the construction of a set of temporary shelters in Guapi (southwest of Colombia) for 42 families displaced by armed conflict. After winning the bid from the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), they completed the project in 28 days thanks to the joint work of 15 people, while recycling more than 200 tons of plastic.

According to the NRC, the shelters have "a design adapted to the need for mobility and climatic conditions," and the layout of the roof "improves both ventilation and lighting allowing for suitable conditions in such a hot climate." The community project also has electrical installations, toilets, and three communal kitchens for the housed families.

The revolutionary initiative from Conceptos Plásticos has already set its eyes abroad and won $300,000 (USD) in the latest edition of The Chivas Venture, to step up its production on a global scale, after beating out 26 other international initiatives with social impact.

https://www.archdaily.com/869926/this-house-was-built-in-5-days-using-recycled-plastic-bricks
 
Last edited:
Back
Top