A granola bar wrapper, the shrinkwrap on a cucumber, the mailer from an online store. The average person interacts with dozens of pieces of plastic every day, most of it totally ephemeral. By some estimates, the lifespan of a plastic grocery bag is a mere 12 minutes—yet that sack will take 1,000 years or more to break down in a landfill. The world produces more than 350 million metric tons of plastic waste a year, and, in the U.S. we recycle less than 10% of our castoffs. So it makes sense that anyone trying to be more aware of the amount of waste they create would be hungry for a solution.
There are entire businesses that promise to handle our hard-to-recycle plastics, but some zero-wasters are also taking matters into their own hands. Case in point: Ecobricks, a popular social-media trend in which individuals collect every bit of their personal, non-recyclable plastic waste and cram it tightly into single-use bottles, which can then be put to use as a makeshift building material. The practice promises to divert untold tons of waste from the landfill, but is it really that simple? The answer is, unsurprisingly, complicated. Here’s what to know about ecobricks and ecobricking—and whether bottle-stuffing plastic is worth the effort.
What is ecobricking, anyway?
An ecobrick—sometimes also called a “bottle brick”—is a plastic bottle manually crammed full of mixed plastic scraps. To make one, a person collects, cleans, and dries all the plastics they can’t put in their blue bin, cuts them into pieces, and fills up an empty water or soda bottle. The goal is for the brick to be as dense as possible with no air pockets, so ecobrickers often wield a wooden dowel or spoon to compact the plastic bits. The resulting “bricks” can then be put to use in small-scale structures like garden retaining walls and art installations. Despite what the name might imply, ecobricks generally aren’t a good substitute for conventional materials in larger structures like buildings.
Though ecobricks have only cropped up on Instagram, Tiktok, and Facebook in the last few years, they started to go global around 2012, when a Canadian artist Russell Maier visited the Philippines and saw the impacts of plastic waste there and in other nations on the receiving end of the global flow of plastic waste.
Seems like a good idea. Is ecobricking helping?
Not exactly. Ecobricking is a short-term solution that could perpetuate a long-term problem, says Susanne Brander, an ecotoxicologist at Oregon State University who studies the impacts of plastics on the environment and human health. There are more than 16,000 chemicals used in plastics as fillers, dyes, stabilizers, and flame retardants, many of which can have a range of negative impacts on human health. A recent study in The Lancet even found there could be $1.5 trillion in medical costs associated with just a few of those chemicals.
“Every time you combine different plastics together to make an ecobrick, you are making new mixtures of those chemicals, and every time you make new mixtures of those chemicals, you could potentially be causing more or different health impacts,” Brander says. And, she adds, if an ecobrick gets destroyed in a disaster, that creates the risk of a “toxic soup” or materials releasing into the environment.
Ecobricking can also distract from the real problem, which is that we’re making too much plastic to begin with. Intentionally or not, Brander says the practice can encourage the production of new plastics. “It provides almost kind of a false solution: ‘Oh, well, it’s OK to make more plastic bottles and fill them with Coca-Cola, because we can take those plastic bottles and build houses out of them,’” she says.
Is ecobricking worth my time?
Maybe once. The process of making an ecobrick is laborious—particulary when you factor in the time needed to properly clean and dry all those plastic scraps. Plus, what few studies have been done to test ecobricks’ structural integrity have found that extreme and consistent density is the only way they’ll work as a sound building material. That could be tough to muster from a cadre of DIYers. At the same time, many online ecobrick devotees say they aren’t even certain what to do with the bricks once they’re full.
As a one-off project, however, making an ecobrick could be instructive. “It does give people a chance to think about what plastic is, how it’s made, how difficult it is to recycle, how difficult it is, how long it takes to break down,” Brander says. “I think there is some educational value in that, but to employ it on a mass scale would push us in the wrong direction.”
What should I do instead?
Step one in addressing your personal stream of plastic waste is to avoid as much of it as possible—at the store and in your home. That means opting for reusable water bottles, coffee cups, straws, baggies, and other single-use items as well as choosing products packaged in metal, glass, or paper whenever it’s available and affordable to do so.
You can also spend the time you’re not spending jamming candybar wrappers into a bottle to turn your attention towards pushing for top-down change. “The most important thing to do right now is to vote for people who are wanting to make those upstream changes,” Brander says. “The biggest challenge right now is that we are incentivizing the continued production of plastics from fossil fuels and subsidizing that instead of more sustainable solutions.”