One eco-brick at a time .
Every day, approximately eight million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans, rivers, and landfills. It is a crisis and has a harmful impact on ocean bacteria that produces 10 per cent of Earth’s oxygen. Something needs to change and fast.
Fortunately, companies like SW Contracts have planned strategies for limiting the side effects caused by single-use plastic. We’ve invested time and research into building our own environmentally-friendly furniture with the use of eco-bricks. To put it simply, an eco-brick is a plastic container that is densely packed with non-recyclable plastic to create a reusable building block.
We’ve used eco-bricks to build different types of furniture and garnered initial interest when we displayed a few pieces at the Rand Show. Since then, we’ve expanded to the possibilities of educating the youth on how to build their own eco-brick furniture and opened up another door for job creation. Currently, we are assisting a small group of young individuals from Cosmo City named Tino, Melissa, and Samantha. These eager students are actively involved in learning about the issues of single-use plastic and how to build their own coffee tables, ottomans, and even lunchboxes from eco-bricks.
Our next step involves employing people without jobs to create eco-furniture that can be donated to children’s homes, orphanages, homeless shelters and poorer areas of South Africa. If you are passionate about a cleaner world, job creation, and sustainable living, please help donate to our NPO, the Living Creatures trust (soon to be renamed The Natural Co), at www.swtrust.co.za . All proceeds will be used to fund the eco-brick project and its beneficiaries.