Costa Rican company turning plastic waste into building blocks

The Costa-Rica-based Centre for Regenerative Design and Collaboration (CRDC) has developed a new process that takes the waste material and turns it into an aggregate that can be used as a constituent material in concrete building blocks for housing and civil infrastructure projects. It’s taken the company roughly two and a half years to take the idea from drawing board to a launch at the Sustainable Brands Oceans conference in Porto, Portugal, last November. “We wanted to make sure that we had everything in order, from the recovery of the plastic in the processing until we went onto the higher volumes,” explains the Centre’s CEO Donald Thomson, a Canadian national who moved to Latin America over thirty years ago to work in the affordable housing sector.

Thomson claims that the system CRDC has put in place uses ‘all’ types of plastic, no matter which polymer. “We use all types of post-consumer and post-industrial plastic, including foil laminates,” he insists. “We recover the plastic from various waste streams, environmental cleanup programmes, municipalities, institutional and post-industrial.” To increase collection efficiency CRDC has also designed a collection truck called MOBI, which includes an on-board facility to shred plastic waste at the point of collection. Once it is shredded, the plastic is cleaned, mixed with mineral components and heat extruded. After that it is crushed into the desired aggregate size and shape to perfectly simulate standard construction fine aggregate or sand. Essentially the product, pre-conditioned resin aggregate (PRA), is a plastic/mineral hybrid.

Thomson asserts that the construction industry has been accepting, at least in Costa Rica. “The engineers really love the product because you can’t tell the difference – it looks and feels almost exactly the same as standard concrete. And they are thrilled because they feel that they are making a contribution in terms of reducing the environmental impact – they know they are using a green building material.”

Source: Resource