Plastic 'bricks' provide temporary solution for South Africa's trash

Baker is the co-founder of the South African NGO Waste-ED which was founded in 2012.

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - They may look like just plastic bottles stuffed with paper, but to Matt Baker and his colleagues, these are building bricks that they are sorting at a warehouse in Cape Town, South Africa.

Baker is the co-founder of the South African NGO Waste-ED which was founded in 2012 to help find solutions for the world’s waste management problems. Apart from their education and consulting activities, Waste-ED has pioneered the use of the ecobrik in South Africa.

Ecobriks are plastic bottles of varying sizes that are crammed with non-recycle material making the bottle sturdy enough to be used in some forms of construction. They were first used in Guatemala about 30 years ago.

Waste-ED is working with Peter McIntosh, the founder of the Natural Building Collective to research the reactions of ecobriks under different climatic conditions and using various types of plaster. They also test for fire retardance, insulation, and other key factors.

"We’re gonna do a couple of more free-standing tests in the parking lot, just lighting and plastering ecobrik walls just to see how they behave, because ecobriks have been used in every fashion you can imagine and what’s nice about, the testing phase here, is that we will be able to provide data to people all over the world to make more rational choices about how they use ecobriks," said McIntosh.

The 2018 ‘South African State of Waste Report’ stated that of the 42 million tonnes of waste generated in the country in 2017, only 11% or 4.9 million tonnes was recycled. The country’s Department of Environmental Affairs reported last year that 98 million tonnes of waste is deposited across South Africa’s 826 landfill sites every year.

"So making ecobriks as a temporary solution is very important, to see it as a temporary solution so that we can really can focus on the bigger problem, the source problem, not just, you know, the problem that there is waste around us and it is not very nice to look at, but rather dealing with the roots of it, that producing these types of non-recyclables isn’t right, and that we need to be looking at either alternative products, packaging, or alternative systems where these products are being supported or either recycled or re-used," said Waste-ED founder, Candice Mostert.

Mostert and Baker have also reached out to schools to get children involved in making and using ecobriks.

The walls of several structures at the Early Childhood Development Center in the Delf township on the outskirts of Cape Town were built using ecobriks and glass bottles.

"It is very colorful and the bottle alone all different kinds of colors of these ecobriks and at first used to throw it away into bins, but now I can see what you can all build of the eco...the bottles and all the papers you can build all kind of stuff with it," Zaydin Davidson, a student, told Reuters while making ecobriks with his classmates.

Waste-ED say they now have over 20,000 ecobrik collection points in Cape Town.