For the people asking about micro plastics…
I’d wager a bet, that cleaning up the tons of plastic trash and converting them to this, is by leaps and bounds reducing micro plastics in the environment. It’s probably not perfect, but far better than just letting the existing plastic degrade in the open.
They’re plastic bricks that get used as pavers. They’re still going to be exposed to elements that will cause them to break down, and processing them into bricks likely releases a bunch of microplastics that otherwise may have remained sequestered in a proper landfill. It’s still the same plastic in a different shape and location.
The only thing we should be doing with plastic waste is figuring out a safe way to destroy it.
edit: also she’s not cleaning the plastic up at all. she’s buying recyclable plastic from the people who are cleaning it up, then releasing god knows how many pollutants turning it into a brick that she sells for profit.
edit2: lol their faq page says they’re accepting investors but not donations of plastic waste. makes the priorities pretty clear.
It’s cute that you feel so strongly about how poor people handle the trash that you threw away.
Don’t want them turning your waste into bricks? Give them better bricks or give them less waste.
I’m not sending them the waste. Petrochemical companies were trying to get the US government to bully them into accepting it, despite their ban on single-use plastic. You think its a coincidence that one year after that didn’t pan out you get these very vague feel-good stories of a young startup entrepreneur coincidentally finding some wiz-bang new method for recycling all the trash we want dumped on them? Do you think nobody has, until this moment, conceived of turning waste plastic into building material?
It’s probably a bad idea, and isn’t really helping, but it makes people feel better about exploiting the global south so I guess we have to support it!
You think they weren’t already getting exploited? Lol that’s cute.
Im glad you think im so cute but if you want to be belittling I suggest you use a little more variety.
You are correct, once plastic is made, the best thing to do is sequester it in landfills. Any sort of processing releases the untold additives in there, it’s worthless recycled and done just to say they did it for subsidies paid with taxes, and doesn’t fill a particular need.
The best bricks are made out of brick. Clay, even mud, and straw, make fine bricks. Unfortunately there is more and more plastic waste, and there is no good answer for it. Stop making so much, is the only answer.
I’m doing my part, trying to minimize it.
I’d be a lot less worried about micro plastics and a lot more worried about how fire resistant they are.
And you’d lose that bet.
I don’t think so. The surface area of let’s say a plastic trash bag is massive compared to compressed brick like this. Scale this to probably hundreds of not thousands of bags it takes to make one brick and it’s a huge difference. Yes it still sheds and degrades, but the surface area is exponentially lower.
To get there you need to process the plastic which releases some of the myriad additives in that plastic, which are toxic. You want to sequester this plastic not free it’s components. If you want to help, reduce the amount we are making in the first place, because any sort of recycling makes pollution worse.
Yes in an ideal world we would ban plastic. We aren’t there, but I think this is a good step with what we have in front of us.
I’m not gonna say its a bad idea because it can be workable, but bricks have pieces break off or erode or whatever. When its rock and mortar thats nbd, but plastic? Eesh. Yeah you can use them on the inside of buildings but even then if a building gets demolished in some which way (or catches on fire), thats a whole thing too.
Look up “The Station” fire, there was melting Styrofoam falling from the ceiling onto people. I imagine these bricks will do the same.
Plastic can burn, but plastic can also have fire retardants mixed in to keep it from burning. The fire retardants themselves are a different environmental concern, though.
The only perfect solution to plastic waste is to stop making so much damn plastic.
You might be right, and you might be wrong, but if an engineer developes something you might expect that some tought went into it.
To that end, engineers spent a lot of time with asbestos too
Sure, and also with wooden structures, or rock, or steel. And they spent time on desposal of the asbestos in a safe way too.
Before materials sciences asbestos was a wonder material.
It still is, it’s just a deadly one
There was a big indoor pool area close to where i grew up. One day the concrete ceiling just fell down because they used a steel that was eaten up by the chlorine fumes over time. A bunch of people died being trapped under the massive concrete slab. These were also highly regarded engineers who designed and built that thing.
Hmmm. That sounds like it could be what happens to those cheap apartment blocks that fall down in Florida on the regular. Sea air, steel supports…
If it’s the one in Switzerland I was referring to, it wasn’t some cheap construction job. It was actually recently inspected, and one of the steel hangers was found broken. The inspector then just had it fixed and never bothered to inform anyone, they just assumed it had been broken from the start. They were convicted of negligent homicide as a result.
Ah, consequences. More countries need that.
So it wasn’t an engineering fault but a lapse in inspection. Maintenance is required for all engineering. Always has been.
Typically, inspections like these are also done by engineers. If you work in a field like this, it is improtant to keep up to date with current developments. Like in this case, since it was built it was found that the alloy used wasn’t that great when contacted by chlorine. So an engineer seeing a broken hanger (along with some brown spots on other hangers) should have at least reported it and not just assumed it had always been like that. They should also have reported the brown spots. Typing this I do realize this was in 1984, and you couldn’t just go on the internet to check if brown spots meant anything. Then again, as one of my engineering mentors always said; “Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups.”.
that’s bloody awful! Was this the one in Switzerland?
You forget, business majors are often the ones who pay to develop things and they don’t always think about things or listen when engineers talk to them.
I’m an engineer, and I’ve never hade the people paying me not listen to me. Why wouldn’t they, they paid for it? It is up to me to give valid information for making the choice.
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Chemical engineer. If they don’t listen to me, people might get hurt, the environment might get damaged or something might explode. Which can be said for any engineering field (including software) in some degree, but chemical industries have learnt the hard way that they should listen to the engineers, while chemical engineers have learnt they should document everything to keep the business majors accountable.
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I’m envious. I’m an industrial engineer and I’ve had employers brush off my recommendations from “here’s a mathematical model showing how your proposed idea doesn’t work, and the experiments we did of it were a disaster” to “hey, this is pretty heavy, we’re going to need tool assisted lifting”
When you work in product development, it happens ALLLLLLLLL the time. The FAFO is nice when it inevitably backfires on them but its still REALLY frustrating.
Lmfao
I might hope for it, but never expect it. Roy J. Plunkett, and how Nobel made the money for the prize are fairly good evidence in that regard.
You know what else makes good bricks for cheap? Clay. Clay and straw. You can even use mud. You can dry in the sun even.
At this point plastic is probably more available than clay. Especially if Kenya is one of those countries we send our “recycling” to, that usually just ends up in open pit third world landfills.
It depends on the area for sure, but mud works for bricks too in parts. Some of the ancient world was built with mud bricks, I think mesopatamia for instance, like babylon, was thought to be mostly mud bricks.
The plastic is toxic is the problem, full of toxic additives that get released in any sort of processing, the best case for used plastic is to put it somewhere out of rain and sun. It sucks, but the best thing to do is make less in the future. Unfortunately we are making exponentially more plastic all the time. It’s really incredible how society really dropped the facade we had these last 30 years and showed itself to be, well, what you are looking at.
Cool concept.
I would love to know more. Mainly how energy demanding the process is, Does it start to brittle in the sun shine, how fire resistant it is. Does it shed more or less microplastics than recycling the plastics other ways. Can the bricks be recycled if necessary.
Plastics aren’t being recycled, or reused, in other ways, that’s the biggest problem after, you know, just making and using too damn much plastic–that’s the “reduce” part we tend to ignore.
There has been massive progress in banning single use plastics and using alternative packaging materials.
You are missing the point here. If i had right now resources to build a single facility, would dedicating it to make these bricks be better or worse than making mechanical recycling center for plastics?
Kenyans gonna live in Lego houses.
I’d actually love to live in a Lego house. Colorful, change on demand, weekend fun with the kids.
lego lawsuit incoming in 3… 2… 1…
Honestly a shit idea
This is going to make the microplastic in testicles problem so much worse isn’t it
I have said for years, as soon as it becomes more profitable and important for climate science to be supported it will get figured out. Hopefully before it’s too late, but probably not.
ain’t that like super-flammable
That’s great, but not a long-term solution. Only intermediate storage of toxic waste that will still turn partly to CO² with tens of years.
Im sorta curious about it being used as a spacer to use less concrete.
Like, bricks?
except covering all sides. Mabye like rebar in some cases and in the case of roads thing concrete, these, then top thin layer of concrete.
But like i said above, roads and walls deteriorate too, the plastic only goes into the environment a century later then. Even if we build more like in the Pantheon, so it lasts millenia.
Yeah although unless we have a real chemical type recycling it is going to deteriorate somewhere as we handle it now. There also could be long term benefits. One problem with rebar is when the concrete cracks and water gets in the rebar starts to rust which is why the things come apart. It could possibly last longer. Its all sorta supposition at this point but if it is stronger than concrete it could be interesting.
Better to just burn plastics (with filters) to make electricity, imo. It’s like oil with extra steps then at least, instead of still going CO² but creating harm til then.
I mean it it did cause it to last longer with the rust thing I think that would be a better case. I mean concrete with rebar lasts a long time but if there is no rust of the rebar it should lasts like multiple facter levels longer. That is a lot of savings. Construction has a high co2 and other environmental costs. The longer something can go, in general, the better.
Now that brings me joy
why aren’t these used in construction elsewhere if it’s five times stronger than concrete?
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