I was introduced to eco bricks a few years ago at my eco warriors club at Bay Primary. I remember once surfing in Muizenburg with all this plastic and these
needles floating past me. It made me really upset. I made the decision to start eco bricking at home. My mom got on board and we started. The first thing I learned was how much plastic goes into one eco brick (loads). Only by making an eco brick properly and compressing the plastic can you see how much plastic goes into an eco brick..
It made my family aware of how much wasted plastic packaging there is on food. Plastic around cucumbers?? Polystyrene and plastic on everything from broccoli to mushrooms, plastic bags to put your vegetables in, plastic over fruit and potatoes, the list goes on and on. We made a choice to never use a plastic bag again. Even if it means taking all the goods in the trolley to the car because we forgot to bring our boxes and bag alternatives. We sometimes get very con
fused looks from the people at the tills.
The other day I stood in a local supermarket. They had run out of plastic bag alternatives. Every single person was taking a plastic bag. Did you know that 10 million plastic bags are used around the world daily? If you tied them all together they would wrap themselves around the world seven times in an hour. What are we doing as citizens to stop this crazy use of plastic bags? Most of them end up at landfill or in the sea killing marine life. Once the marine life dies and breaks down, the plastic does not and carries on destroying our environment.
Eco bricking has taught me to consider what we do with our waste. If it is can’t be recycled it goes back to the dump. Which in our area is by the sea. With our high winds in summer a lot of trash from the dump ends up back in the sea. This is why I choose to eco brick our rubbish on the beach. There is nothing worse doing a beach clean-up only to realise 
that the plastic picked up is going back to the dump and is not cleared responsibly from the environment. Next time you pick up a piece of plastic. No matter where you are, consider rather putting it into a plastic bottle to eco brick. Let’s try and get as little waste to the landfill as possible.