Making “eco-bricks”
From Bottle School Wiki
An eco-brick is a plastic bottle stuffed solid with inorganic dry garbage. Making eco-bricks is simple and ultimately important! It’s the main material used for bottle schools and it has an enormous impact to the environment and it's inhabitants. To make one, you basically need a plastic bottle, inorganic trash and a stick.
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Garbage that can be used
The best materials are ones that serve no second purpose, for example paper is recyclable, so things made of polystyrene, aluminum, all kinds of plastics and in general synthetic materials, are the perfect eco brick filling. A list of possible waste would include: food packaging old socks, razor blades, used up pens and markers, clothing tags, cotton swabs, and any piece of useless garbage you could imagine.
Garbage to avoid
Garbage must be relatively clean of food and always dry. This is important because it can cause mold and other unpredictable bacteria to form. However, even food packaging/garbage just needs a shake to get most of the food off. Natural resources as water must be carefully used and avoided whenever possible. Also avoid batteries and other toxic waste.
Make an eco brick
First, have in mind that a proper stick is needed: one that reaches the very bottom of the bottle and that won’t break. Sticks that have a sharper end are best. Second of all, consider that having different kinds of materials will make the stuffing easier. If you are planning to use objects, make sure you have plastic or a similar malleable debris to fill in the gaps. Stuffing the eco-brick entirely to make it solid from the very bottom up, is totally elemental, since not doing so could make the process harder.
Determine eco-brick quality
A completed eco-brick must not have a single gap, (the weight may vary according to the debris used) and to know how solid it is, the bottle must not mold down if standed upon- therefore the word brick.
Eco-bricks in construction: sizes, widths and heights
When starting eco-bricks, its best to select the most common bottle size in your area.There is no problem in using different sizes in the same construction, but organizing width differences in a single wall may be complicated. Bottles (within a given quadrant) may have varying heights as long as the widths are the same. In fact, it is almost essential to have a mix of bottle heights to fill the quadrant. (You may need a varying combination of taller and shorter bottles, or even a horizontal row or two.) A quadrant is a square area formed by two columns and two beams. If the widths of the bottles used in a single wall vary, the widths of the quadrants will also vary. What matters most is that the chicken wire forms tightly to the bottles for a smooth finish.
Storage and Precaution Measures
Eco-bricks are made of materials derived from petroleum, therefore they are highly flammable. So they must be stored with safeguard. They are also weather resistant and must be stored with their caps on to evade insects.
