We made Ecobricks!

Following our trip to the Gillmoss Recycling Discovery Centre we decided to focus on the rubbish that doesn’t get recycled as this amounts to over half of the households’ waste. We learnt that some councils get the waste incinerated to create energy, however the borough we live in unfortunately just sends this waste to a landfill. To get the children active on this topic we have collected (and cleaned) plastic that is “not currently recycled” and took a bag of it to one of our meetings alongside some washed plastic bottles and we set out to create ecobricks! An Ecobrick is a reusable building block created by packing clean and dry used plastic into a plastic bottle to a set density (they have to be at least 0.33g/ml to be sturdy enough). With the help of Ecobricks plastic can be removed from the system and turned into unique furniture or even buildings!

While the children were chopping up the plastic into smaller pieces and stuffing them into the bottles we were chatting with them about recycling and what happens to waste that doesn’t get recycled. Understanding the severity of the waste problem and inspired by it, one of the children, Eva (6) created a leaflet to let people know about the issue and prompt them to act against it. At the end of the programme the children could take home their half full ecobricks to continue filling them at home.

 Read more about ecobricks on https://www.ecobricks.org/.