The community of Noordhoek filled 800 EcoBricks, and then turned them into a beautiful bench near the beach!
Noordhoek, South Africa (02 March 2020) – Earth & Co teamed up with Project Noordhoeked to build a beautiful community bench at the beach. The bench was made using 800 EcoBricks, meaning around 400kgs of unrecyclable waste has been stored away instead of ending up in landfill and the ocean.
According to Earth & Co, the community contributed the EcoBricks for the project. Now, as they sit at the beach watching the waves crash, they will know their hard work paid off!
Whenever we write about successful EcoBrick projects, we often have readers ask about how to make them so you will find all the information below.
Filling an EcoBrick is really easy. Just put every bit of plastic that is non-recyclable into it. Here are some examples of things to put in your brick(s).
- Plastic Straws
- Plastic Wrap
- Chip Packets
- Plastic from Earbuds
- Old Toothbrushes
- Cellophane
- Old Balloons
- Polystyrene (cut it smaller before attempting to stuff the bottle)
- Plastic Cutlery
Your Eco-Brick needs to weigh more than 500g and all the bits stuffed inside need to be cleaned and dry before being placed in the bottle.
How to stuff your eco-brick
- Identify materials that are not compostable or recyclable by your local recycling facility
- Clean any dirty items by using leftover dishwashing water and leave to dry
- Stuff your clean and dry materials into any size or shape plastic bottle
- Compress it as tightly as you can with a stick – NB, this is very important!
- Keep doing this until you’ve got a bottle that is as hard as a brick – we will be squeezing your eco-brick to make sure it’s properly packed! If we can squeeze it, we can’t accept it.
- Set yourself goals to phase out these items until you don’t need to use the eco-brick anymore!
Take a look at the gallery of how it was made below.
You can see the finished bench below.
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