Precious Plastic’s world’s first open-source building brick from plastic waste

Precious Plastic just released a brick made from 100% recycled plastic to empower people to build constructions just like with LEGO (but a whole lot bigger). The brick design is published open-source, meaning that anyone can download the drawings online, for free, and start turning plastic waste into a useful building material.

The bricks are easy to produce without any special skills and quick to assemble with a hammer – perfect for temporary structures after natural disasters or long term structures like low cost housing and public buildings.

The Ocean Cleanup and others are making a huge effort to collect plastic, but are often dumbfounded about what to do with it afterwards because it’s unsorted, degraded and dirty.

At the same time, 1.6 billion people are lacking adequate housing, which doesn’t include the growing number of people every year being displaced due to natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes.

Precious Plastic’s brick, which uses 1.5 kilos (3.3 lbs) of plastic waste and takes about 4 mins to produce, addresses both these challenges.

Companies like Conceptos Plasticos and ByFusion also make recycled plastic building bricks, but their designs and machinery are proprietary.

Precious Plastic instead created a “how-to” tutorial for making the brick that uses our open source machinery already operated by more than 400 independent Precious Plastic projects around the world.