Plan For Plastic

The first permanent Ecobale / Ubuntu-Blox structure in the USA is getting plastered! 1800 pounds of plastic in the walls, diverted from the Caja Del Rio landfill in Santa Fe in partnership with a dozen local businesses!

Reach out if you would like to come for a visit or volunteer (40 minutes from Santa Fe) and please follow us on Facebook and YouTube - we're sitting on a whole lot of footage to share of the building process! Thank you for your support :)

Ecobales! Shown here is the compression, leveling and anchoring of the laminated wood top plate to lock the structure together. The walls are composed of about 1600 pounds of bagged, compressed and baled mixed plastics from our past plastic collection services in Santa Fe.

These Ecobales are laid in between rebar verticals and each course is secured with horizontal wiring. Once the top plate is in place the rebar uprights are anchored to it and heavy duty braided wire is looped from anchor points in the footings and over the top of the walls.

Ecobales, also known as Ubuntu-Blox, are the invention of Harvey Lacey and were first demonstrated in Haiti following the earthquakes in 2010. With his projects he built an outstanding answer to the question "How do we make earthquake safe buildings with readily available materials?" Several buildings were made there with bagged and bailed styrofoam. Later a small portable shed was built and tested in Texas for seismic resistance and withstood everything that was thrown at it with no structural damage.

Since being introduced to the open source Ecobale tech in 2014, we have built 5 wooden Ecobale Presses (4 are roaming) and are excited to share our designs with the world soon! Through this amazing and simple solution we have managed to create a successful pilot project in Northern New Mexico for plastic upcycling and build something really cool. Did I mention that this is open source?? So please like and share and know that every piece of plastic that goes in the trash could go in a structure like this! Thank you for reading :)

Hi everyone! We are in the process of rebranding Upcycle Santa Fe into Plan 4 Plastic. This is going to take a bit of time but we are really excited about it and hope you are too! We got to hear a lot of feedback throughout the years regarding our name Upcycle Santa Fe. A lot of people thought we were a bicycle shop. A lot of people have no experience with the word upcycle. So it was tough to explain.

The vision for Upcycle Santa Fe in the beginning was to create a waste management center to upcycle all sorts of materials, including food waste, glass and metal. Through it all though the most important issue has been and will always be plastic, and showing people what they can do with it. Thus this rebrand and Plan 4 Plastic.

Also a more focused effort on education and casting the seeds of this knowledge far and wide. This has been the most successful aspect of our work. We have built Ubuntu-Blox presses here in Santa Fe as well as in Utah and Costa Rica, and have helped others build them in Africa and India. It's the teach a man to fish kind of thing and it absolutely makes the most sense. This is the power of open source!

The research and work will continue here in Santa Fe. We've said it before many times but if you want to build something with plastic then we'd like to help! The possibilities are endless and hot damn we have to start dealing with these plastics in a good way. So stay tuned and thank you Santa Fe and all of our followers around the world. Let's make some good work happen and make rehabilitation a celebration. With love, the Plan 4 Plastic crew.