Encouraging ecobricks
With the first strong southeaster of the summer season battering the Peninsula, the amount of litter cast by the uneducated or uncaring becomes even more noticeable as gaily coloured plastic bags soar like eagles on thermals above our heads or adorn prickly bushes that have captured them, earning the name of ‘national flower’. There was a time when the micronage of plastic bags was restricted to lessen the impact of littering, and a fee charged at the till for every bag used, yet there has been no lessening of the eyesore nor apparently any public awareness of the need to contain our waste. If anything, littering has grown to be a national pastime, with fast-food containers, bottles and chip packets thrown from car windows all along our scenic routes and at picnic spots where the natural beauty of the surroundings goes unnoticed and unappreciated. You may gather that littering rates number one on my gauge of blood-boiling events. To see the effort some go to in wedging an empty water bottle under a rock or behind a bush rather than carry it back down the mountain beggars belief. If they can carry it up full, why can’t they carry it down empty?
The photo featured here is a 2 litre plastic milk bottle (conveniently square in shape) that will be called an ecobrick once it has 2kg of plastic waste jammed into it, and is used to build structures such as houses and schools. Filling them is in itself is quite an achievement, as all air must be expelled in the squashing process – the handle of a large wooden spoon works well, and can also be used on the litterer – but can be fun and a challenge at the same time. If every child in every household in this country were asked to fill an ecobrick and compete to have, say, a school that collects the most with an appropriate reward, surely it would encourage them to first of all not throw any plastic anywhere except in the bottle and secondly to collect litter for the bottles once they are out of the habit of littering? Can it be so difficult to encourage a culture of cleanliness? First the parents need to buy into this, as there appear to be few role models out there, but eventually they must notice that the environment is clean again. Or am I expecting too much? I fear so.
