what if the building material of the future is trash around the world entrepreneurs grind waste up melt it down and squeeze it into bricks these recycled bricks can pave roads pad playgrounds and build homes and schools here are five countries using garbage to build stuff this is melted plastic mixed with sand look like two ideally speaking that's it's very visual like that and it becomes as hard as concrete once a hydraulic press squeezes it into shape a company in Nairobi wants to install these plastic bricks on streets across Kenya's capital N zomie mate opened her company jieng maker in 2018 so jeng is a Swahili word which translates to build yourself the factory processes three of the seven types of single-use plastics here on my right these are the hard plastics and here on my left these are the soft Plastics Kenya has one of the world's toughest bands on plastic bags but bottles and other containers are still everywhere this is where workers sort them they can handle about 10 metric tons of plastic every month so this is the guy who starts starts our production without him we are nothing so big up Vinnie operates the crusher which pulverizes plastic into small pieces very loud workers fold the dry mix together with a shovel depending on the color you want this is the stage at which you put the color pigment and then after that it's fed on the extrud this machine heats the plastic and sand mixture until it's soft enough to mold this is one of my proudest moments as a person as a team member and also as the founder of jeng so what you see here the machine and all the others we fabricated here in Jang it is mixed together at very high temperature so it changes anything from 300 to 400° Centigrade where it mixes that plastic in sand and forms a gooey like a d like material and that's what we make the Bri each lump of the mixture is weighed by hand people say the smell is something like new asphalt on a hot day so the brick Joseph is producing is a 1.3 kg so that's what he's measuring he measuring 1.3 kg of the mixure this hydraulic press can squeeze 9 bricks at a time ideally speaking it's like making our cookies and this here is Lawrence he's the guy with the my T so I let him do his thing at this point the bricks need to cool so they can Harden at room temperature so here is the curing bed so once we take from the hydraulic press we feed it in the curing bed and then after like about 2 to 5 minutes you have your finished product many bricks come off the press with Jagged edges a worker breaks them off on a large Stone before adding the finished bricks to a stack for now now jeng's output is modest we need to increase our production to mass produce what we are doing currently right now we are doing like around 1,500 blocks a day that's about enough bricks to cover a courtyard like the one at this community center for me I think the price is cheaper and affordable compared to other materials used to make Pavements a pallet of 400 plastic pavers can sell for up to $150 depending on thickness the company says that's about 25% cheaper than bricks made from concrete you're also working on manle covers the other one is um roofing tiles the other one is drainage gutters and also in addition to that we're targeting also to improve and um optimize the technology because I get the feeling we are only doing like a really small portion of it and there's so much potential that this technology has that we are yet to realize and this is just the beginning turning waste into pavement is an idea that's already caught on in other countries construction workers in India have been mixing small amounts of plastic waste into asphalt for decades making New Roads that are stronger and that last longer but experts say these Innovations may increase the amount of plastic released into the environment roads are subject to constant abrasion we drive on them right and so roads are actually the primary source of microplastics in the environment even on Pure Asphalt roads the paints used to make lines contain plastic and particles rub off the tires on vehicles every time they drive now if we build the entire Road out of plastic or even part of the road out of plastic that is going to be more abrasion of plastic and more microplastics going into the environment in recent years researchers have found microplastics in nearly every sample of our food drinking water the air we breathe and even in inside our bodies tangri says that any solution that doesn't focus on decreasing the amount of new plastic going into production lets the people who created the problem off the hook the petrochemical industry would like nothing better than to say we can put it all into roads or we can do something else with it still roads made with plastic are cheaper mainly because they require less asphalt and they make good use of plastic that would otherwise end up in places like dandora nairobi's only official landfill the cars that bring these Plastics are are more every day every day they come every day it reached full capacity 20 years ago but new garbage keeps coming in as you can see most of the West here is plastic West Amos wman is an environmental activist and renewable energy consultant we even have the smokes and all that being uh plastic being burned which is very problematic to the health in nairobi's poorest areas there are no Sanitation Services many people toss garbage into rivers or just burn it as much as 750 tons every day Kenya does not have enough infrastructure to allow recycling but that didn't stop American Oil lobbyists from proposing a trade deal to export millions of tons of plastic waste to Kenya the American chemistry Council was advising the US representatives uh within the trade deal uh negotiations to include a cloud that would allow plastic materials to be imported to Africa through Kenya zomie knows that her invention can't tackle a mountain of trash that large so far her Factory has recycled 50 metric tons of waste this year but Nairobi produces six times that amount of plastic trash every single day we need variant Solutions so I cannot say this is the solution in terms of like does the biggest impact and all that stuff no does it have an impact yes do we need to do more definitely still she is continuing to expand her business zambie being the founder of jeng motivates me a lot she wants to achieve a lot in life she wants to achieve a lot for the company in 2020 the United Nations recognized in zomie as a young champion of the earth and awarded her $10,000 and she said say her company is closing a half million seed funding round we have more demand that we can supply and that's because there's a lot of Market awareness and Market uptick that is coming in and once again as I said with the ship meal shift with consumption but we cannot produce that she employs 20 people full-time nearly all of them under 30 years old me my team and everyone else in this space we get to earn a living and that I'm happy with most of her customers are local including her mother who is also an entrepreneur she just started a business raising egg laying hens in her backyard they are very peaceful Birds yeah I've got 1,200 yes Zombie's first experiments with plastic trash took place here now her bricks cover the entire driveway even outside she has done this up to outside the the compound and we are very grateful now we live in a very good place eventually n zomie wants her business to grow internationally plastic waste is not just a Kenya problem it's not a Nairobi problem it's a worldwide problem and so if we can figure out how to solve it in our local then it's easy to replicate that solution to maybe to start with the East Africa region Africa region and then to the greater part of the world and her biggest fans support the future she's building one brick at a time as a a mother I'm very proud about [Laughter] her this is one of Nigeria's first tire recycling businesses workers start by ripping out the steel wires so the rubber can be cut shredded and turned into bricks for driveways and playgrounds this is softer and actually a big bounci here e falo started free recycle back in 2018 now her company recycles hundreds of tires per day we have over 400,000 tires stockpiled on sides but it's only a tiny slice of the problem humans throw out around a billion tires every year recycling them gets expensive and complicated so in most countries they just pile up in landfills and here in Nigeria they can help spread malaria we have stagnant water that can then become a breeding ground for mosquitoes so why is it so hard to recycle tires and why are Tire graveyards so dangerous more than half of all the cars in Nigeria are in and around its biggest city losos so there's a good chance old tires will end up with a roadside mechanic like some maybe you are going on the road you have flat tire I will repair it for you he saves any Tire he can't fix to sell to free recycle Sway and other shop owners like Adams make about 30 cents for each tire it's good it's good good because that this tire is condemned before cannot use for anything before before so but now can I can set for free company today's Hall will be stored in the lot behind free cycles's 2 and 1/2 acre facility when a fedala wanted to launch the business no one believed she could make money out of a pile of tires it kind of looked at us like we're crazy and generally that was the reaction but now she has more than 100 full-time employees and the business makes about 16 cents for every recycled tire my first Tire the first baby was recycled in in October 2020 the first challenge is removing the steel wires Ed Ed within the rubber so one of her first Investments was this machine called the debater which removes them in about 20 seconds next the tires head to this Chopper which cuts each one into four or five pieces making them easier to work with the company can process about 150 car tires per hour the same things that make tires durable also make them hard to recycle in the 1800s Charles goodar accidentally dropped dropped rubber treated with sulfur onto a stove and discovered a process to harden the material called vulcanization it made rubber stronger and resistant to extreme temperatures exactly what cars need out of tires as more Americans started driving rubber production exploded in the early 20th century and most of it came from plantations in Southeast Asia and then World War II happened the verdict is in on rubber the the enemy now has over 90% of the world's source of raw rubber the Allies needed a lot of rubber for trucks cars and planes the US asked its major manufacturers to find an additional Source synthetic rubber one of War time's newest Industries one of America's modern Miracles today's tires are a blend of natural and synthetic rubber reinforced with metal and plastic fibers to make them more durable but no matter how tough they are they don't last forever and all of the old rubber quickly piled up by the end of the 20th century the US had accumulated well over a billion old tires in landfills they can Lee toxins and when buried they can sometimes trap methane or other gases and literally float to the surface they also burn fairly easily in 1987 about 30 Acres of tires caught fire in Colorado it took almost a week to put them out and the incident brought this kind of waste into the national Spotlight within a few years all but two states passed laws that helped fund a new tire scrap industry by 2021 the US had reduced the number of stockpile tires to just 50 million now America Burns a third of its used tires to fuel cement kils and paper mills and another third are turned into rubber surfaces like artificial turf less than 20% ends up in landfills but in developing countries like Nigeria Tire waste is still a growing problem the country ranks in the bottom 10% worldwide for recycling and sustainability but free recycle is aiming to change that at the factory outside of logos the shredder rips tires into chunks these drums crush them into even smaller pieces workers rake the remnants over vibrating screens and large vacuums prevent rubber dust from filling the factory air pieces 5 mm and smaller fall through larger chunks go back through the process and get get crushed again magnets pull out any remaining metal shards so here is the fiber separator where the fibers have been separated from the Chrome rber these are reinforcement fibers usually made of plastic nylon or some other synthetic material Now All That Remains is rubber the final vibrating screen separates the different sizes powder which will give a softer feel suitable for playgrounds and gyms and 3 to 5 mm crumbles which are durable enough to use for driveways to make those papers rubber crumbs twirl inside heated mixers a polyurethane binder helps hold everything together it took a long time to figure out the right ratio that could work in Nigeria's tropical Savannah climate a mix or formulation that would work in let's say Europe wouldn't necessarily work here so you know you just have to find what works best dyes adjust the color a small layer of the colored mixture goes into the mold first then the rest of the brick is filled in with undyed rubber mix which helps cut down on manufacturing costs then it is pressed down by hand and loaded onto trcks after loading it it's been roll to the hydraulic press where we where we press all the mix material for proper compression finally it sits in an oven to dry for up to 8 hours Nigeria's unreliable electric grid means the factory has to make most of the power it uses 80% of our power is generated internally from diesel power generating sets workers tap the dried pavers out of the molds on a typical day they make roughly enough pieces to cover an entire tennis court every Tire produces about 25 of these dog bone-shaped rubber Bricks now they're ready to ship scrap tires have become a 12 billion Global industry in the US Europe and Japan most get recycled and many are burned to create energy Tire based fuel costs less than natural gas and burns cleaner than coal but it still produces emissions comparable to other fossil fuels in another method called pyrolysis tires are heated to extreme temperatures without oxygen ADV claim it's the cleanest way to recycle them but it requires a lot of energy leaving small profit margins in the US a third of recycled tires become new surfaces in homes and playgrounds or mulch for gardens in response to public concerns about shredded rubber leaking toxins one US Federal agency said it couldn't prove there were any health risks but it recommended that kids should not eat the rubber Sound Advice back in losos free recycles top selling items are paving stones used in playgrounds like this one at an international school we've been very happy with the service um the products good the thick rubber provides a nice bounce for children at play but also makes repairs and additions easier if you want to add more services or add more structures you just remove it and and when you finished put it back while free recycle aims to eliminate all of Nigeria's Tire dumps for now this waist stream is still growing but that's not eo's only concern the mother of two is raising a family and a business together she says free recycle is on the verge of becoming profitable and she continues building it Brick by Brick I think she's like a natural fixer she saw a problem she found a solution Charming but she's disturbingly efficient she plans to expand throughout the country as well as Rwanda IV Coast Ghana and Kenya I would like to see us um tackling more waste different types of waste your paper waste electronic waste uh pet bottle that's why our tag line is waste to wealth these bricks are made from seaweed the secret is sargassum an invasive species washing up and rotting on beaches around North America yeah the massive waves can lead to respiratory problems and can cost Millions to clean up but where most people see a problem Omar Vasquez saw potential he turns the seaweed into bricks strong enough to build homes that he says can withstand hurricanes Omar and his family immigrated to the US with nothing in their pockets when he was just 8 years old now he uses his bricks to build homes for low-income families like the Lopez's could this invention help other countries clean up their coastlines we went to Mexico to see how entrepreneurs like Omar are making the most out of a stinky situation Omar and his team start collecting the seaweed at 5:00 a.m. today they're in Puerto Morelos a small Beach town about 25 miles from Cancun hotels pay them to get the Seaweed off the beach and out of the view of tourists they collect about 40 metric tons of sarasam every day enough to fill two of these containers [Music] the idea to turn seaweed into bricks came to Omar in 2018 when more than 50,000 metric tons of sargassum overran the coast Omar makes the bricks which he calls Sara blocks at his Workshop 10 minutes from the beach workers grind the dry sargassum into a fine powder by Smashing it with rocks then they mix it with dirt which Omar repurposes from construction sites they shovel a mixture of sargassum dust and dirt through a grape to remove any large chunks they mix the powder with water to form a thick paste the exact recipe is a secret but each brick is about 40% sarcasm sargo blocks can also be recycled again and again with this single machine Omar can make up to 3,000 bricks a day he developed eight prototypes before perfecting this one now he's designing a bigger machine that could produce 8,000 bricks a day he has six full-time employees making the bricks and some help build homes too since 2018 Omar has built more than 40 homes the first one is right next to his Workshop he named it after his mother when he was 8 years old Omar left behind a home just like this one to cross the Mexico US border with his mother they wouldn't have a Home of Their Own for the 30 years they lived in the US he finally returned to his home country for good in 2014 with just $55 in his pocket he used it to start a business buying and selling plants and he eventually saved enough money to buy this lot developing Saga blocks required a lot of trial and error Omar's business is called vetto blue green he makes most of his money selling plants and from hotels paying him to clean up the sargassum he also sells his bricks and builds houses he has sold more than 20 homes and given away another 15 Omar admits the houses may not be fancy but they are durable that's good news for Elizabeth Del Carmen bonola Lopez and her daughters their home was destroyed in a hurricane in 2021 Omar helped them rebuild it with Sara blocks indeed research shows that weed is a great insulator that keeps homes cool in the summer and stores heat in the winter usually Omar hears about people in need through a friend or local and there's no lack of raw material over the past decade waves of sarcasm have gotten so large you can detect them from space in 2020 the Mexican Government collected 19,000 metric tons of sargassum from quintanar Ro beaches in 201 21 collected twice that [Music] amount studies show prolonged exposure can make it hard to breathe in 20123 the Cancun hotel association set aside more than $20 million to remove it from beaches and the problem goes beyond Mexico the invasive wheat has spread to Shores across North America in Florida Texas and other parts of the Caribbean the exact cause of the increase isn't clear but some experts blame high levels of nitrogen in the sea a result of agricultural waste runoff and deforestation so now Omar's business is getting International attention he's given TED Talks appeared on Shark Tank Mexico and traveled internationally to promote his product investors and businesses from over a dozen countries have reached out to learn from him Omar is exploring licensing and franchising the SAR block recipe to other businesses elsewhere in Mexico other entrepreneurs are experimenting with new ways to use sarcasm like making notebooks and even shoes a British startup called seaweed generation is using sargassum to capture carbon and store it at the bottom of the ocean back in Mexico Omar is simply grateful to be living in his home country surrounded by the people he loves and after work he returns to a home he built himself using his own bricks Omar hopes his success will inspire others hundreds of billions of milk cartons get thrown out every year and the center in Thailand can recycle thousands per day into building materials the carton get turned into bricks or pressed into Roofing these kinds of boxes are really hard to recycle because of the layered mix of aluminum plastic and paper but one of the world's largest producers is trying to make that easier a Swiss based company called tetrapack made 192 billion food and beverage containers in 2021 it started programs to keep a portion of those out of landfills here in Thailand the company has set up collection drives at some schools and some of the final building materials help rebuild homes for victims of natural disasters so can the world's largest carton manufacturer make a difference in reclaiming the waste it makes we visited Bangkok to find out how to fix a house using old cartons of milk it's morning assembly time here at the hok school since the '90s the Thai government has encouraged milk in schools in a country that traditionally didn't consume much Dairy three decades later drinking milk is a deal habit for students like Johan this school goes through about 5,000 containers a month and nearly all of them get [Music] [Music] recycled this educational campaign is sponsored by tetrapack the packaging giant headquartered in Switzerland the recycling program is active in over 400 Bangkok schools as well as 150 drop off points across the capital but this is a fraction of the company's overall output tetr Pac says it's reclaimed 50 billion cartons in 2021 about a quarter of what they made in that year alone the cartons end up here at eco-friendly Thai a recycling company that specializes and beverage containers and used paper the rachab buy plant processes about 12 million cartons a month first they have to be broken down to make it easier to separate the cardboard from the plastic and aluminum the walls of the cartons made by tetrapack have six layers all of them can be recycled on their own but many recycling facilities don't have machines that can process them all at once about 75% of a carton is paper which provides structure polyethylene PL plastic makes up 20% and helps seal the packaging the last 5% is aluminum a thin foil helps keep the contents fresh and extends the product shelf life and a special heating process sterilizes both the product and the package making some items shelf stable for up to a year the hydrop pulper breaks up the layers into tiny pieces then the boxes go through three filters to separate and remove the paper each filter is finer than the last any waste water gets pumped back into the pulper the remaining plastic and aluminum end up here at the dump screen the pulp is trucked to another plant and will be turned into toilet paper and cardboard meanwhile the leftover mix of polyethylene plastic and aluminum is headed to eco-friendly plant in notu it's called pel for short first workers crush it with a coarse grinder then it goes through another round of cleaning to filter out any remaining paper pulp next a hot air dryer removes moisture workers feed it into a second grinder [Music] then it's ready for the extruder which heats the ground material temperatures reach up to 392 de fah the compressor uses a cooling system to shape the polyl mix it cools for 3 minutes in the mold and voila ecob braks but because most of the carton is paper it takes a lot of them to make just one brick the bricks will be ready for commercial sale in early 2023 they also sell the polyal to companies like Advanced mat which converts the mixture into plastic pellets the company makes cheers Roofing sheets and insulation tetr Pac has donated nearly 70,000 Roofing sheets to help victims of natural disasters and the aluminum from the polyal helps cool the homes making the roof cheese out of this material help actually to protect the heat from the Sun at the same time with the property of polyethylene that we have in our material it also helped the material to be strong tetrac has been donating their mil carton roofs to places like the Chang [Music] Temple the Abbot has also purchased sheets of the polyon material for other roof repairs he says the milk carton panels are more durable than his old roof tiles the office in the back is mostly made of recycled polyal from the roof to the wall cladding in 2021 tetr Pac spent less than 1% of its annual revenue on recycling programs the company says it plans to invest about $100 million each year over the next decade to increase the amount of recycled material that goes into new packaging their Ty recycling program started in 2006 but it's been hard to raise awareness Teter pack admits it's still has a long way to go we can make an improvement in the bigger scale in term of climate impact and also biodiversity we also want to expand in term of recycling products that we can manage and we can produce in order to be able to contribute more to the communities this rock hard beam is made from hardto recycle plastic like grocery bags bottles and even Electronics a company called conceptos plasticos takes plastic basically no one else wants and turns it into building materials the finished bricks interlock like life-size Legos the company makes it easier for locals to earn money picking waste out of dumps or off the street don't the mission to improve the lives of waste collectors and turn trash into something useful like this [Music] Schoolhouse plastic is piling up in Ivory Coast a country like many around the world that has almost no formal recycling programs could these building materials be the solution we went to West Africa to find out how to make schools out of worldwide waste fatumata is one of thousands of self-employed waste collectors in Ivory Coast she gathers plastic from this dump site in abon the country's biggest city and she likes what she does she's part of an informal Collective of waste Pickers trained by conceptos plasticos they gather many types of plastic including stuff other recyclers won't take fatat says that since joining the company's training program she makes about four times as much as she used to collectors get paid at a local sorting site after workers there weigh and log each bag conceptos plasticos pays 100 CFA Franks or about 16 cents per kilogram of plastic we try to avoid intermediaries and we triy all the time to empower directly the people that is collecting the plastic in the street then it's time to start sorting they take out pieces that can't be used for bricks like PVC which can release toxic fumes when melted all the time we are getting material that we cannot transform PVC or some P some kind of P so that's also their work is to sort again and check again which kind of plastic we are getting and take out the the PVC after sorting they load plastic into a Crusher by flattening the waist about four times as much fits in each truckload to the factory this facility can process about 40 standard garbage trucks worth of plastic each month workers load hard plastics like these from Electronics on a conveyor belt which carries them to a Crusher every time that you work with plastic you need to have a small size we have crotches just to take the plastic maybe 5 mm size the CR brush chips go into a hopper then travel down the line to be melted soft Plastics like grocery bags go through different machines but the process is similar they're shredded into tiny pieces and melted down later the final mixes combine different categories of plastic in specific ratios we have two different kind of mixes one mix for bricks and other one for columns for structural elements we have small percentage of some additiv to help the plastic in the machine and everything the company keeps those recipes a secret hidden from our cameras behind this curtain along with the equipment that makes bricks behind the wall we have all the technology and the molds that we develop that's the way we do the bricks but they did show us how beams and columns are made by pushing the hot mixture into long molds workers lower them into water to cool things down they remove this rod and the mold pushes out a beam the team cuts the beam into shorter segments and drills holes at each end any leftovers like the rough end pieces go through the whole process again again this school was made from the Recycled building blocks in [Music] [Applause] 2019 and there are more than 300 classrooms made with conceptos bricks around the country Oscar Mendes and Isabel Christina Gomez started the company in 2010 they're based in Colombia but in 2019 they got a call from UNICEF asking them to expand their business to another country in need Ivory Coast according to the UN more than a million ivorian children don't go to school and sometimes it's because they simply don't have a place to go classrooms are too far away or too crowded normally there're for 50 Children and you can find them up to 80 or so teachers they say that it's impossible to give lessons and to teach in a normal way each one of these takes about a month to build the government they love the project from the very beginning mostly because it was quick construction here in a coast can take up years the government estimates that Ivory Coast needs about 30,000 more classrooms just like this one to end the shortage so is there enough plastic trash to build all those technically yes the city of abon likely creates enough waste each day to build about 45 classrooms collecting sorting and transforming all that plastic is the hard part we need to design a really good sting process here okay take this out and bring bottles bring the bottles but tell tell the guy take this out chop chop Oscar says bringing this process into more communities could be the key we are solving local problems and the solution should be local we are trying to see how can we go down with the really small scale and go directly to the people who can maybe make their own bricks and their own products he says the company has transformed more than 3,000 metric tons of Ivory Coast plastic since it got started here in the long run solving the plastic problem means making less of it but for the foreseeable future the waste has to go somewhere and ultimately the work is about a lot more than using up trash we are doing good things for the environment and for people we are really happy to see how people is changing their lives their faces their looks they tell everything because for the very first time they have something that it's their [Applause] [Music] own [Music]
