Waste plastics can cause serious environmental pollution. In Indonesia, two entrepreneurs came up with a very creative way to turn waste into treasure and make plastic waste into recycled environmental-friendly bricks. These bricks are currently used in parking lots, recreational parks, and other places.
▼Two young Indonesian entrepreneurs, Ovy Sabrina and Novita Tan, co-founded the company, “Rebricks”, in June 2018. They brought back layers of composite plastic waste rejected by the garbage recycling plant to the factory. After mixing cement and other materials to make recycled environmental-friendly bricks, their business won the “Circular Innovation Jam” award last year!
Ovy and Novida visited the landfills and recycling plants near Jakarta and Bogar, West Java, and found that many plastic wastes were rejected, such as instant coffee and instant noodle packaging bags. Soft plastic. These refuse to be recycled and are generally piled directly into landfills, causing pollution to the soil and environment, or when disposed into the ocean, pollutes the marine environment, and even threatens the survival of marine life.
▼They brought this rejected plastic garbage back to the Rebricks factory, where it was shredded by a special machine, and the master mixes cement in proportion with the wastes and then puts it into a machine to blend and compress them into plastic bricks.
▼This process sounds simple, but it is not an easy task to use various materials and make bricks with sufficient compressive strength in appropriate proportions. Initially, Ovy and Novida could not find a suitable machine for shredding plastic. They would cut the plastic with scissors using their bare hands and experimented with the mix to come up with the right ratio. It took 18 months to find the proper mixture.
▼Finally, they developed a paving brick with a compressive strength of 250kg per square centimeter, which meets the Indonesian national standard and has been used in parking lots, parks, and other places. They also put the failed finished products that they had initially produced in their office, reminding themselves that “without these failures, there would be no successful day”!
▼Ovy said that the current process ensures that the recycled plastic materials will not be exposed to the upper surface of the road bricks to prevent plastic particles from polluting the environment. About 20% of the raw materials for each paving brick come from plastic waste, and each square meter of paving brick uses 880 multi-layer composite plastic waste, the factory can produce up to 100 square meters of paving slabs a day, which is equivalent to recycling 88,000 waste. If the machines operated at their maximum capacity, they can recycle about 33 million a year. Rebricks will announce its second product soon, which is a hollow brick that can be used to build houses.
These two young girls used creativity and perseverance to turn plastic waste rejected by the recycling plant into environment-friendly bricks. It’s really amazing! Local citizens look forward to their new products, which will give a stronger boost to environmental protection!
