Anna Fletcher: Indian student creates a brick made from recycled plastic
India throws out over 9 million tons of plastic per year... Banerjee and his team work with waste
collectors in West Bengal to gather garbage -- including water bottles and
disposable bags. The detritus is then cleaned, shredded and pressed into blocks
manually. Each Plastiqube brick costs 5 - 6 rupees (about 8 cents) to make,
while the average clay brick sells for about 10 rupees (14 cents), Banerjee
says. What's more, unlike traditional bricks, Plastiqubes don't use any mortar.
When an Indian engineering student visited a traditional brick kiln, he was appalled at what he saw.
"My moment of
reckoning came during that field trip," says Abhishek Banerjee, recalling
the 2016 visit. "We saw that the workers there were being treated very
inhumanely. And the working conditions of that brick kiln were very improper --
people were digging clay with their bare hands."
Working conditions in
brick kilns can be harsh and bonded labor is widespread -- a type of modern
slavery where employees are made to work to pay off loans at usurious interest
rates. But India's 140,000
brick kilns also have an environmental cost. As well as creating dust and
sulfur dioxide, which can cause respiratory diseases and put stress on local
crops and wildlife, one study estimated that India's brick kilns burn 15 -
20 million tons of coal each year. This releases over 40 million tons of
climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. While a student at
Jadavpur University, Banerjee wanted to find a creative and socially beneficial
alternative to the brick kilns....
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/25/asia/plastiqube-brick-india-scn-intl-c2e/index.html
