Photo: ByFusion
Since 2015, an environmental company named ByFusion has been working to turn plasic waste into construction materials. First popular for its applications to supporting housing construction in areas of need, last week they unveiled the Blocker, an inudstrial machine that can take any category of plastic waste and turn it into a block they say is “better insulated than concrete & stronger than bricks.”
They then decided to get creative with the technology for World Oceans Day, organizing an event in Manhattn Beach, California, where the blocks were used to build a lifeguard tower made from 1,400 pounds of plastic waste and recycled surfboards.
A ByFusion press release announced they’d used boards donated by Channel Islands Surfboards and Sustainable Surf as part of a partnership to start incorporating waste from the surfboard manufacturing process into their ByBlock product.
“This has the potential to recycle all of the surfboard foam waste in California, thus eliminating one of the biggest waste streams in surfboard manufacturing,” said Kevin Whilden, co-founder of Sustainable Surf.
Typically, recycled plastics have to be washed and sorted for almost any repurposing but the new Blocker takes any class of plastic waste — Polythylene Terephtalate, High Density Polythylene, Vinyl, Low Density Polythylene, Polyproylene, and Polystyrene — and turns it directly into ByBlocks without any sorting. The Blocker works like a trash compactor by basically feeding plastics into a water boiler and compactor that spits out giant blocks more dense than cinderblocks.
“The retail prices will be comparable to common hollow cinder blocks but only produce a fraction of the greenhouse gases,” said ByFusion CEO Heidi Kujawa.
