Why the world needs recycled plastic bricks (and how to make one yourself!)

This may look like an oversized Lego brick but in fact is an exciting new building material. Hi my name's Rory and for the last six months I've been volunteering at the Precious Plastic HQ in the Netherlands. We have been designing a recycled brick made from a hundred percent plastic waste. Before I show you more let's talk about why we designed such a brick. I'm sure you're well aware right now that plastic pollution is a huge problem. It is estimated a truckload of trash enters the ocean every minute and 90% of that comes from developing countries. While at the same time 38 percent of the world's carbon emissions comes from the construction industry alone. With popular building materials such as concrete also leading to the destruction of the ocean floor through the dredging of sand and the destruction of mountains to acquire more stone but the world needs more buildings. According to research done by Habitat for Humanity as many as 1.6 billion people lack adequate housing, not including the growing number of people every year being displaced due to natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes. That's a lot of homes we need to build and in return a lot of carbon emissions. So when Precious Plastic invited me to the Netherlands, I knew we were starting a project with really impactful results. So for the last four months we have been grinding, welding and extruding until we finally came up with a good brick design. Some of our prototypes were a little more conventional while others were a little more exotic. All these iterations meant a lot of moulds and of course a lot of failures. We even had the occasional explosion. Some of these were more controlled than others But taught us some valuable lessons about plastics. We even tried mixing plastics with wood to see how contaminated plastics affected its properties with some interesting results and we even tested how different plastic types reacted to prolonged sun exposure and heat. While doing all these experiments we judge ourselves on three criteria affordability, accessibility and quality. and we hoped that by remaining faithful to these we'd come up with the best solution possible. Our first brick that we made was exactly that. A brick, heavy, undesigned, raw block of material and very similar to what most houses us in construction. The problem with this is that even though plastic is a waste material it's actually expensive to collect and sort. at 1 euro per kilo, we need to make sure our bricks maximise their use of this precious plastic. This approach to keep the brick affordable meant we needed to make the brick hollow. Then by increasing the size of the brick while making them slightly thinner we were able to create a brick that was 33% cheaper than the first version. But the problem with this brick even though efficient. Is that it required these tapered walls to allow us to get it out of the mould otherwise as it cooled it would shrink around the mold eventually getting stuck but these tapered walls created a more shingle light design. which we felt would reduce adoption if your walls weren't actually level. So we got rid of that design to adopt something more familiar. Although the design requires more material making it slightly less affordable the straight external edge allows us to use the same brick to make corners thus making it more accessible and requiring less molds by the manufacturer to create a whole structure. Because we also now have a larger surface on the top and tight interlocking teeth. The structure is significantly stronger. Which meant we can create a stronger interlocking structure much faster than conventional masonry building types. So now the brick is designed and unfortunately the funding is over. We released all the drawings specs and how tos to create your very own brick structure on the Precious Plastic how-to page and our website. Links to those can be found in the description below. We have a lot of ideas of how we can use this brick to clean up huge volumes of waste. While also allowing us to build cheap structures anywhere around the world. From hygienic wash facilities to shelters for the homeless. The possibilities are really endless. Hey before you go. Everything this video was made possible by grants and donations from passionate supporters of Precious Plastic and Recycle Rebuild. As little as one euro a month can make a huge difference to projects like ours. Please consider making a donation via the website. Thank you! :)

Channel: Recycle Rebuild

Views: 631,024

Keywords: Precious Plastic, Recycle, Plastic, Brick, Lego, Recycled, Recycle Rebuild, Eco Brick, Eco, Opensource, Free, How to, guide, Ocean plastic, Waste, trash, crafts, make, extrusion, plastic recycling, Plástico Precioso, Reciclar, Plástico, Ladrillo, Reciclado, Reciclar Reconstruir, Eco Ladrillo, Gratis, Cómo, Guía, Plástico oceánico, Residuos, basura, artesanía, fabricación, extrusión, reciclaje de plástico, ईंट, लेगो, पुनर्नवीनीकरण, रीसायकल रीबिल्ड, इको ब्रिक, इको, ऑपनस्रोस, फ्री, कैसे, गाइड, वेस्ट, मेक

Id: Aqn1PYbkgf0

Length: 5min 54sec (354 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 06 2020