Climate crisis reaches worldwide scale
"When you get a soda from a vending machine around campus I bet you have never thought that that bottle could help build homes or be the foundation to your future outdoor garden. By simply taking that bottle and stuffing it with plastic wrappers, lids or any other plastics you may find you are keeping plastics out of our ocean and out of our streets or landfills."
Posted Sept. 14, 2022
By Reed Mulkey
Opinions Editor
Across the world there is a crisis, a climate crisis. Day after day humans toss their plastic into the street. This is one of the leading causes of climate change along with factories and cutting down forests. Bottle bricks are one of the many ways you can help.
When you get a soda from a vending machine around campus I bet you have never thought that that bottle could help build homes or be the foundation for your future outdoor garden. By simply taking that bottle and stuffing it with plastic wrappers, lids, or any other plastics you may find you are keeping plastics out of our ocean and out of our streets or landfills.
“Ecobricks are a simple, low-tech, non-capital, plastic transition technology that follows the Earth’s example of carbon care,” states ecobricks.org. The bottle gets so full of plastic that it becomes as tough as a brick. With these bricks, people have made housing structures for people who otherwise can't afford it, backyard gardens, art, furniture and so much more.
In Portland there are not enough “ecobrickers” to have a drop off place for the ecobricks. If we were to have more people interested in making ecobricks then we would have a place to drop off ecobricks made by people who don't want to keep them. Those ecobricks would then be sent off to people who need them for their house or any other needs.
It only took me one day to build an ecobrick. I collected plastics from people in my class and from around my neighborhood. In the end, I had over a hundred pieces of plastic in my bottle. That would have ended up in the streets or a landfill.
If the school was to have a competition in advisories as they do for can collecting imagine how much plastic trash would be collected. We could turn the bricks into an art wall. Signed by the artist that made it and every student in the winning advisory. That would be historical for our school.
If you want to get involved please visit ecobricks.org for more information.