you with the plastic bottle
The empty cola bottle beside you today could be the building blocks of your home tomorrow. A few things are certain in life: death, taxes, and waste. It fills the oceans we swim in, washes up on the beaches we bathe on and fills the streets we play in. A truckload of waste enters the ocean every minute and it can’t handle it. All of us know it is unsustainable and all of us know it’s a problem.
We are on an endless cycle of producing and consuming, leaving a trail load of litter behind us which we don’t know what to do with. Luckily for us the kids in school who actually revised while we all hung out at Maccies have got a few tricks up their sleeve. Us lot in the UK only recycle about 7% of the plastic which is about as impressive as the way we’ve handled this pandemic. Luckily for us it’s not the government handling this , and while it’s unlikely London will be built from the same stuff my little brother uses to build the death star the fact at hand is 40% of global co2 emissions comes from the construction industry and yet one and a half billion people are without decent homes and that’s before we account those who have or will be displaced from natural disasters.
“I just want to say one word to you-just one word…plastics..Theres a great future in plastics.” Bill Henry
This is where companies such as ‘Conceptos Plásticos’ in Bogotá, Colombia come in where they combine their problem of housing and waste management by using the dreaded plastic, which keeps us all up at night, to build houses which could last for hundreds of years. But how do they stay warm at night bar a decent cuppa, well 1.6cm of plastic insulation is more effective than a metre of concrete.
I’m sure a lot of you reading this will think ‘sure that all well and good in low-income countries with cheap labour etc but what about something closer to home’. Well, it doesn’t get closer to home than the land of brave heart and the beloved trainspotting, a Scottish firm ‘MacRebur’ is using hard to recycle plastics to make up roads and pavements. What this does is takes away the need for thatsticky tarmac which uses up all that carbon which becomes part of the never-ending problem child, global warming. It’s an absolutely amazing project and will remove the need for constant pothole repairs, which cost billions, that force us to go right around the world just for a bottle of red.
The same way I wouldn’t expect you to stop having a drink on a Saturday and probably a Wednesday I wouldn’t expect anyone to stop using plastic. What can you at home do about it? Well firstly make sure you put that empty cola bottle beside you in the right bin, it’s the one with the arrows that go round in a circle on it. Look obviously as a individual it will be hard to start making immediate impacts but collectively we can promote ,share and support these companies and their ideas no matter how out of this world they seem.Remeber these are the people who managed to hand thier homework in on time so listen to what they have to say.