In many ways the structure, tucked on a hill and behind some ponderosa pines off Herold Ranch Road, looks much like any other house under construction.To get more news about byblock, you can visit shine news official website.
But the multicolored blocks that make up its still-uncovered walls would say otherwise. They are plastic, made of everything from plastic bags to single-use cups and straws, all compressed into what could otherwise be mistaken as a standard cement block.
The house, being built by Flagstaff resident and former county supervisor Art Babbott, will be the first of its kind: a residential house made of the ByBlocks, a product of Los Angeles-based company ByFusion.
“The beauty is everything, like there's no high value plastic in here, you know, flossers and straws and just the junk of the junk,” Babbott said, gesturing at one of the blocks. “The coolest thing are these green ones are from fishing nets from the great Pacific Ocean trash island.”
Indeed, on some of the blocks, the lettering of the nutrition facts from a piece of plastic food packaging was still clearly visible.
Babbott is building the one-bedroom, one-bathroom, 600-square-foot house as part of a 2019 county program with the goal of encouraging innovation in building across northern Arizona.
And while the walls of Babbott’s house currently wouldn’t look out of place in a trendy brewery, by the time the construction finishes, the home will look much like any other.
Babbott sees it as an exciting development for a community that recently faced the sudden closure of the recycling center in Flagstaff earlier this year.
The city is now shipping its recyclables to a facility in Phoenix.
But Babbott hopes his home can demonstrate optimistic possibilities for the future of recycling locally.
And that sentiment was echoed by ByFusion CEO Heidi Kujawa.
“Every community that we speak to is struggling with the same challenges. I mean, this plastic problem is pervasive, we're not going to change it overnight,” Kujawa said. “So in the meantime, we've got to do something to stop the bleeding, and more importantly, clean up the devastation we've left behind us.”
She said for ByFusion, the pervasive challenge of plastic waste in so many communities is a real opportunity to create solutions at the local level.
And Kujawa said they hope their company and the manufacturing of ByBlocks in Tucson, and potentially other communities, can augment already existing recycling programs.
“Our mission is really to help declutter that blue bin, so the recycling centers have less to sort through and it makes those processes more efficient,” Kujawa said. “The best way to think about it is, if you have a blue bin program in the community today, you put your water bottles in there, and then everything else goes into our process. And that enables us to keep it out of a landfill.”
Indeed, ByFusion already has growing presence in Arizona. The company is working with the City of Tucson not only to take plastics from that community, but also has plans to open a facility there to produce the blocks.
The company worked with Tucson on a pilot project last year. Kujawa said throughout the Tucson pilot project, they collected 110 tons of plastics to be turned into the blocks, more than double their goal.
