Kuching Polytechnic Students Go Viral For Recycling Plastic Waste Into Bricks
About 70% of the brick is made from melted plastic.
By Alyssa J. Oon — 07 Aug 2019, 01:44 PM
A group of students from Kuching, Sarawak have gone viral for their innovative idea of recycling plastic bottles into bricks
Twitter user @chelompelom tweeted a photo of the group's final year project (FYP) on Monday, 5 August.
"Not into the metal straw thingy, but we still wanna save the turtles... just in a different way," the tweet read.
The tweet has since racked up over 3,700 retweets and 3,100 likes.
The team's brick is made out of 70% plastic waste, while the rest of it is made up of river sand, fine and coarse gravel, and calcium carbonate
Jerome Emmanuel, a petrochemical engineering student, told The Rakyat Post that one brick is made from 1.3kg worth of recycled plastic.
The rest of Jerome's team includes Nur Syafiqah, Nur Mastiqah, Ros Amirah, and Fakhrul Azeem.
In a separate tweet, Jerome said that his team used polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles for the project, as it was the easiest to clean and dry.
"We melt it in a kuali or a furnace in our lab's fume chamber," he explained.
Jerome stressed that the aim of the project is to "reduce plastic waste and turn it into something else"
In a reply to a curious netizen's question, Jerome shared that his team sourced for plastics from recycling centres and recycling bins around their campus.
"Cause, y'know, one man's trash is another man's treasure," he joked.
"Please I urge you to recycle your plastics so my friends and I can use it to maybe build small buildings using these plastic bricks," he wrote in a follow-up tweet.
