From Trash to Timber

My sister is all worked up because she’s working on a blog about all the plastic bottles that are floating in our oceans. On the positive side, I’ve been noticing something new more and more so I decided to write a blog about it that would give us yet another use for all that plastic (besides the solar highways I wrote about before).

There is a great new recycled plastic building material that is just starting to become really popular.  I actually got the the idea to check into it because I have seen all kinds of things that they are already making out of it.  Almost all the bus stop benches in our city are made with this plastic lumber. From from what I have been reading comes in any size and colour that you want!  I also noticed that the posts in the public park that we always go to are made out of recycled plastic and they are not even a regularly shaped board.  From my research it looks like some of the companies that make them can actually produce any irregular shape that you need.

Apparently these plastic boards are far superior to wood or concrete for many reasons. The plastic won’t rust, splinter, crumble, rot or leach toxic chemicals.  It can’t be eaten by insects, marine borers or other marine parasites and resists graffiti, and ultraviolet degradation, which makes it superior to almost any other building material. 

You can use it to build bridges, walls, fences and even houses and it can be made harder or softer depending on the type of recycled plastic that they use. They also say that composite wood products are stronger then the competing wood products and last longer and retain their colour better.

In a world where we are constantly looking for more and more materials to satisfy our needs and at the same time our growing population is creating more and more waste, I think it is important for us to find smart solutions that attack our problems from both sides at the same time.  

This is a great solution that gives us reasons to start reclaiming some of the more common materials that we have been throwing away and take thousands of years to decompose.  We can use them for their resistant characteristics as permanent building materials that work even better then the virgin materials we spend so much money trying to get. 

Why not devote all those resources we spend on gathering building materials to satisfy our growing population into harvesting the waste from our oceans and landfills and putting them to use in a way that benefits us? We need to stop contributing to the problem and start coming up with some real and do-able solutions! My Dad says that consumers need to do their part by asking for and purchasing these kinds of products to encourage their production.