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But hopefully the tide is beginning to turn, as a consequence of the increasing pressure from public opinion about the plastic pollution matter. Thanks to the engagement of government and industry with the idea of a circular economy, it seems that there will be an opening in the market – and in people’s minds – to welcome plastic initiatives to replace conventional building materials.

According to the Global Footprint Network, before the pandemic we were demanding 1.75 times the available resources of the planet. Working with the “unrecyclable” waste and developing plastics alternatives to natural materials may reduce this demand and leave a cleaner and more sustainable planet for the next generations.

Our team is currently trying to develop a viable building block made of recycled plastics. We have prepared a range of prospective materials using a mix of virgin and recycled plastics – coloured PET bottles, polypropylene, polyethylene – and other local waste-stream materials, such as hemp, sawdust, concrete waste and red mud.

People traveling on foot in traffic apparently live dangerously. According to the European Commission, about one-fifth of all traffic fatalities in Europe involve pedestrians. Apart from passenger protection, auto manufacturers therefore are also taking a closer look at pedestrian safety.

The Volvo Car Corp. is a leader in the field, using a combination of Bayer MaterialScience (Leverkusen, Germany) materials to manufacture the engine covers, or hoods as the company refers to them, of its four cylinder diesel engines. Two special polyurethane systems provide for a soft "landing" in the event of impact with the hood: the resulting engine hood is elastic, acting as a crumple zone to reduce the effects of impact. The automaker also takes other measures to ensure pedestrian protection.

Volvo Car was in search of an all-around material that offers greater safety for pedestrians, dampens engine noise and can be efficiently processed. The Bayer MaterialScience Oldenburg systems house accepted the challenge: in close cooperation with Czech parts manufacturer Promens Zlin (Zlin, Czech Republic) and Volvo Car, it developed a material solution specifically for this application based on a combination of new grades of its Baytec and Bayfit polyurethane systems.

Such recycled plastics may have lower mechanical properties compared to virgin plastics, because each time you melt and process a plastic, the polymeric chains degrade. But these properties can be recovered by mixing it to additives or virgin plastic. Examples of successful industrial recycling include PET, or poly(ethylene therephtalate), which is used to make soft drinks bottles, and polystyrene.

This has led to a consensus that plastics are an unsustainable material. And yes, plastics are certainly an enormous problem, but they don’t necessarily have to be.

I study plastic waste with the specific aim of finding interesting ways to remove it from the environment. Since 2009, I have developed a number of building materials made of post-consumer plastics mixed with different waste-stream materials. From agricultural wastes such as sugarcane bagasse – a by-product of the sugar industry in Brazil – and coffee dregs, to concrete waste and construction debris, compounded with recycled plastics, there are many ways to obtain materials to produce bricks, roof tiles, plastic lumber and other useful elements for building.

All of the rest can technically be reprocessed into new materials for different applications. In the final instance, any plastic waste can be shredded and used as filler for asphalt, or be pyrolysed – decomposed through heating – to produce fuel. The Japanese company Blest Corporation already sells a portable machine to convert domestic plastic waste into fuel in a simple, affordable way.

The main issue is not with plastic as a material, but with our linear economic model: goods are produced, consumed, then disposed of. This model assumes endless economic growth and doesn’t consider the planet’s exhaustible resources.

Many universities and entrepreneurs are attempting to do this. Most solutions target mixed plastic waste and suggest applications different from the original ones. For example, several groups have developed building materials made of plastic waste.

But there are many ways we could set plastics on a different lifecycle – and one that I have been working on is turning disused plastics into a hardy, reliable and sustainable building material.

Building with plastic waste requires fewer resources than natural products, and would otherwise go to landfill or into the oceans (Credit: Sibele Cestari)

Plastics are strong, durable, waterproof, lightweight, easy to mould, and recyclable – all key properties for construction materials. So what if all of this plastic waste could be converted into building materials for low-income populations? Existing initiatives are promising, but not yet reproducible on an industrial scale.

The three partners cooperated throughout the entire development process, from selecting the raw materials and formulating the products, all the way to optimizing the reaction injection molding (RIM) manufacturing process. In production, the spray elastomer Baytec enters the mold first. It is responsible later on for the desired stability and smooth surface of the parts. The foam system Bayfit is then added to the same mold. Its job is to effectively dampen engine noise. The sandwich structure of these two materials is elastic and represents a great advancement in pedestrian protection. With it, Volvo Car has reportedly set new standards in safety, quality and comfort.

The disposal of plastics is a highly visible global problem – from the highest mountains to the deepest ocean trenches, waste plastic seems inescapable. In natural conditions, plastics are nearly indestructible, and yet they are discarded worldwide on a large scale: the world produces around 359 million tonnes of plastics each year. The environment cannot address their disposal at a speed fast enough to prevent harm to living beings.

There is a common conception that some plastic is "unrecyclable", but given the right treatment it need not go to landfill (Credit: Sibele Cestari)

We are currently adjusting the properties of the materials for the rotomoulding process, a plastics moulding technology that is ideal for making large hollow articles. We want to use the maximum amount of recycled plastics in this block. Blocks made of 25% recycled plastics have performed extremely well in mechanical tests. Next we’ll try 50%, 75% and 100%.

Bricks like these could be the prototype for plastic bricks that are strong and durable enough to be used in construction (Credit: Sibele Cestari)

Building materials made from recycled plastics are not yet widely used in the construction industry – prototypes have mainly been used for demonstrative installations. It will take political will and widespread environmental awareness to encourage more investment into the potential in plastics recycling.

But all polymers are, technologically, 100% recyclable. Some of them have the perfect cradle-to-cradle lifecycle: they can be used again and again to produce the same goods. Some plastics can be reused just as they are by shredding an object into flakes, melting it, and reusing.

Most people believe that plastics recycling is severely restricted: that only a few types can be recycled at all. This is unsurprising. The proportion of plastics that are recycled is minimal. The UK, for example, uses five million tonnes of plastic each year, and only 370,000 tonnes are recycled each year: that’s just 7%.

The problem is that recycling much of this plastic waste is currently unfeasible and unprofitable. Polymers such as rubbers, elastomers, thermosets and mixed plastic waste are comfortably labelled as “unrecyclable” by the recycling sector. But the amount of these materials all over the world is frighteningly large and keeps on growing. What if this plastic waste could be used to produce something useful to society?

Sibele Cestari is a polymeric materials scientist from Brazil, who is currently a research fellow at Queen's University Belfast. This article originally appeared on The Conversation, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence. This is also why this story does not have an estimate for its carbon emissions, as Future Planet stories usually do.

So perhaps plastics are not necessarily the problem. They can be part of a pathway towards a more sustainable way of living. Using a natural or renewable resource is not necessarily environmentally friendly. The ecological footprint of a polymeric material is smaller than that of natural materials, which have a sizeable demand on arable land, clean water, fertilisers and regeneration time.

The engine hoods are manufactured in two basic versions: while the engines in standard vehicles are equipped with a black hood, the hybrid cars have a silver-colored version. Production of the silver-colored parts begins with the application of an in-mold coating. In the same mold, the subsequent processing steps are then carried out as described above.

Plastic items we think of as rubbish can have a second life in construction due to the same properties that make them so hard to dispose of (Credit: Getty Images)

We are also thinking about the aesthetics of the blocks. Blends of recycled mixed-colour plastics usually end up with a grey or black colour. To enable colour, we are preparing blends of virgin or recycled plastics to overlay the main bulk of the block.

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People traveling on foot in traffic apparently live dangerously. According to the European Commission, about one-fifth of all traffic fatalities in Europe involve pedestrians. Apart from passenger protection, auto manufacturers therefore are also taking a closer look at pedestrian safety.