Plan For Plastic

Lathing the corners, and doing the bullnoses on the french doors and window of the Ecobale Shed a few weeks back with my dad. I think it's going to be too cold soon to get the exterior plastered this year but who knows!

The walls of this structure are built with nearly 2000 pounds of bagged and baled plastics collected from a dozen businesses in Santa Fe, NM. Plans and designs are in the works for the wooden Ecobale Press and this structure and will be available next year.

As of late I've been working on what feels like the never ending saga of finishing the glass bottle brick windows, using a new method that I'm calling the Stodgy Stack. I came up with the idea because I didn't want all the weight of mortar mix or cob on the top plate and walls, and some added insulation (more loose plastics around the bottles) sounded good too.

In place of mortar, 1.5" x 1.5" x .5" wood / OSB spacers are cut and construction adhesive is used to stick them in place. Then the gaps are filled with loose plastics or spray foam, leaving an inch or so on the interior and exterior for plaster or cob.

I'm documenting the process and will get a video up on YouTube in a few months. Stodgy because it's an old nickname and also inspired by the British term meaning dense and hard to digest. Thanks for reading!

Hi everyone! It's been a while and I wanted to give an update and a bit of an intro about myself and the work with plastic moving forward. My name is Jo Stodgel and I am the founder of Upcycle Santa Fe which has since been rebranded into Plan 4 Plastic. I am currently finishing up a 120 sq ft structure, the walls of which are made with nearly 2000 pounds of plastic.

I was paid a small fee to collect this plastic every month from a dozen businesses in Santa Fe, NM for a few years. Businesses could put any and all plastics in our collection bags as long as they were clean and dry. The plastic was then layered and stuffed in 2 cubic ft feed bags. Two of these full bags were placed in the Ubuntu-Blox or Ecobale Press and compressed into a 2 cubic ft building bale.

These Ubuntu-Blox / Ecobales are the invention of Texas based craftsman Harvey Lacey, who demonstrated this building solution in Haiti following the landslides there in 2010. Several earthquake-proof structures were built there with a lot of local help and a whole lot of Styrofoam cleaned up from their waterways. Harvey came to Santa Fe in 2014 to share the work with us, build a press out of reclaimed wood, and build a wall out of Styrofoam Ecobales. Shortly after this we started making bales with mixed plastics as a way to deal with the entirety of the plastic waste stream.

I've been researching and working with plastic upcycling since 2009, and have yet to find a more accessible and effective way of dealing with large amounts of plastic than these Ecobales. A sense of urgency has always been present with this work, knowing that these materials which can be of great value are thrown away in mass on the daily and left to become pollutants. At present the Ecobale solution is still largely unknown and I think there are less than 10 Ecobale Presses on Earth.

With the official launch of Plan 4 Plastic I hope to change that. Our focus will be on education and spreading the word about Ecobales (and other open source solutions) to empower communities to address the plastic waste dilemma. More info about it all soon, and thank you for reading!

Working today to get organized, upgraded and back online sharing all the good works that are being done to upcycle plastics around the world! We started in on some big changes to the website and made our Twitter account today if you want to follow us on there. Away from the computers we have been working on a structure outside of Santa Fe, NM made with 1500 pounds of reclaimed plastics collected from local businesses and are excited to share lots of pictures and details in the Spring! Thanks for following us and believing in the work we do!