Every day, Bogotá, Colombia, generates approximately 740 tons of plastic waste that could take 300 years to disintegrate. Thankfully, a Colombian startup is recycling waste plastic into a construction material to mitigate these negative environmental issues. Fernando Llanos and architect Oscar Mendez founded the company Conceptos Plásticos specifically to recycle plastic and rubber into building blocks.

Conceptos Plásticos’s business manager Ricardo Rico told Designboom:

“The objective of Conceptos Plásticos is to answer to different problems that affect the community nowadays while contributing at the same time to the reduction of plastic pollution in the environment and plastic’s impact on global warming.”

Conceptos Plásticos empowers recyclers in Colombia and worldwide. They use hard-to-recycle polymers to make LEGO-like building blocks. Each variety of plastic provides the bricks with a certain quality; thus, we can produce various products through different plastic combinations.

Easy-to-assemble, affordable bricks are the outcome. In addition, they’re stronger than standard building materials, thermo-acoustic, anti-seismic, and flame-resistant.

“At first, it happens to us everywhere that people say: a plastic house! – and think of a bag; people associate plastic with a bag. So, they think that by bringing a lighter close, it will ignite; by putting a finger through it, it will break. But, when they see the product and how solid it is, they realize and begin to weigh differently. After that, breaking that initial barrier for the user is very easy.”

Conceptos Plásticos partnered with UNICEF to turn plastic garbage in côte d’Ivoire into modular, low-cost plastic bricks for classrooms. UNICEF representative Aboubacar Kampo proudly remarked on the collaboration:

“This project is more than just waste management and education infrastructure project; it is a functioning metaphor—the growing challenge of plastic waste turned into literal building blocks for a future generation of children.”

This isn’t the only startup with such a goal. Other people worldwide are establishing companies to make building materials out of plastic waste to reduce virgin plastic use and help tackle the plastic pollution crisis.

For example, Architect Rushabh Chheda launched Conscious Designs while studying at TU Delft, Netherlands. The company creates architectural ideas and products for the circular economy and uses waste as a resource to avoid the usage of high-energy virgin materials. In his master’s thesis, he proposed creating affordable self-built housing utilizing modular bricks made of local plastic garbage to enable underprivileged populations to build their own homes.

In the Philippines, recyclers are transforming bottles, sachets, and snack food wrappers that clog rivers and degrade beaches into building materials. The Plastic Flamingo (or plaf), as they are called, clean, shred, and recycle this ocean plastic into boards. Then, they mold the plastic into “eco-lumber” posts and planks for fences, decks, and emergency shelters. Sadly, disaster relief structures are in high demand in the country.

Plastic in the water is a major environmental problem. It costs an estimated $8 billion annually. China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, and Thailand contribute heavily (around 60%) to marine plastic litter. The Philippines alone dumps about 500,000 metric tons of plastic into the ocean every year.

Therefore, the more startups there are taking this waste and using it to make elements for building, the better. Houses are meant to last as long as possible, so the fact that plastics can last hundreds of years is not a bad thing in the housing sector.