In March 2019, we started to refill used plastic bottles with plastic trash. The previous volunteers from the Environmental Education (EE) Project already began the project of building one bench with eco bricks. We already had around 120 eco bricks from last year, so we needed only 60 more eco bricks for finishing our eco brick bench.

Eco bricks are made out of plastic bottles filled with plastics waste. Each bottle’s weight reaches 300 grams, and it has to be strong and solid. For that, one stick has to be used in a certain way, the plastic can be thick and it takes around 3 hours to complete 1 brick. FSL-India volunteers have collected a lot of plastic from the local shops and the beach cleaning initiatives, so they had plenty of material.

We got some clay and we mixed it together with water and rice husks because we needed it for holding the eco bricks together.

The basis of our bench was cement and on top of it we started to put the bottles in a shape of a half-moon. Every layer of eco bricks needed a lot of clay, so we were separated into 2 groups: one group to build the bench and the other one mixed and stamped the clay together.

Finally, we finished our construction of the eco brick bench with more than 160 plastic bottles at the end of March.

At the end of this eco brick project, we felt it was a lot of fun and work to build the bench for all of us, but at least it was worth it, and it looks really nice.

This is a very curious way to reuse plastics and we are very happy to have a new bench at FSL-India’s CEL where people can sit and relax in the shade.