UK - Recycling Soft Plastic – Everything you need to know

A lot of plastic waste is not recyclable in your weekly recycling collected by your local council every week. So what can you do with the mounds of soft plastic bags or packaging that fills your bin and is taken to landfill to get into our ecosystem? Creating an Eco Brick is an easy way of recycling Soft Plastic, preventing it from filling your black bin and going into landfill.

What is an Eco Brick used for?

The EcoBrickL era has now started and lots of people and businesses across the world are making Eco Bricks and using them to create modular furniture, garden spaces, walls and even full-scale buildings. An Eco Brick is made by filling a clean plastic bottle (fizzy drink, water or squash bottles) with clean, dry plastic until it’s packed so tightly that it is so solid and strong it can be used as a building block. Eco Bricks contain a huge amount of soft non-biodegradable plastic waste that currently can’t be recycled and they reduce the number of new materials needed to make furniture, garden spaces, garden features, walls and buildings, the list goes on.

Many third world countries are now using eco-bricks as the main components for new buildings and they are coming up with new ways to make use of them. They are used as building materials to create insulative structures and colourful furniture.

What is an Eco Brick?

An Eco-brick is a plastic bottle stuffed full of clean soft plastic making them a heavy, strong and solid building block. They will last anything from 300 – 500 years if they are made correctly and packed tightly enough.

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If you don’t have the time to make an eco-brick then there are now lots of companies that have non-biodegradable plastic waste disposal drop off points which will use plastic instead of it going to landfill. When you start to collect your plastic you will be amazed just how much there is and how much room you will have left in your black bin at the end of the week. Just think how much plastic you are saving from going into landfill.

Some Scary Plastic Facts

- Did you know we are producing over 300 million tons of plastic every year, 50% of which is for single-use purposes? Plastic that is utilised for just a few moments, but left on the planet for several hundred if not thousands of years

- More than 8 million tons of plastic are dumped into our oceans every year, dramatically impacting our sea life

- Trash Travels estimates that plastic bags can take 20 years to decompose, plastic bottles up to 450 years, and fishing lines 600 years; but the reality is no one really knows how long plastics remain in the ocean and our ecosystem

- With exposure to UV rays and the ocean environment, plastic breaks down into tiny tiny fragments. - - - Chlorinated plastic releases harmful chemicals into the sea and soil, which can then seep into groundwater or other surrounding water sources and the ecosystem of the world. This can cause serious harm to the species that drink the water and gets into our water and food sources

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