At EchoBrick, we believe that every individual inhabiting this planet is capable of taking a step towards a cleaner and happier environment. Echobrick alone may not be able to save the Earth for all of us but we know that with your help, we may be able to achieve a trash-free planet (or world) wherein the homeless are no more.

Plastic products, wrappers, bottles, and bags are not all that bad. In fact, packaging beverages in plastic bottles instead of glass bottles cuts energy consumption in production by 52% and greenhouse gas emissions by 55%. But since these takes hundreds of years to break down, except for the biodegradable ones which still takes three to six months to fully decompose, they only accumulate in landfills and the in the oceans as time drags on. For instance, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which consists of 7 million tons of weight of trash and twice as big as Texas, became what it is today only within a human lifespan.

Now if you think plastic pollution is only a problem because seeing trashes lying all around is not pleasing to the eyes so it does not really matter if a plastic bag is seen floating beside a turtle, then you are completely wrong. This issue matters. Plastic pollution matters because again, plastic waste takes hundreds of years to break down and that in itself already poses great danger for the ecosystem. With plastic dominating our lands, soil is inhibited from absorbing nutrients. With plastic dominating the planet, animals are killed. An estimation of 100, marine animals are unintentionally killed per year by plastic bags. Some are caused by drowning, suffocating, infection, entanglement, and starvation.

What is more is that we have to spend money to clean the areas we have damaged every single time when we could have prevented it from becoming worse from the very beginning. Sometimes, when plastic wastes have piled up in our landfills we resort to incineration which wastes energy and emits air pollution. It also can not be prevented that some of these gets washed off to places such as rivers and lakes. When chemicals from plastics interacts with water, water quality may degrade. But we do not really need to be given the numbers to know that it is time to start caring about what we have been doing for the last centuries. The challenge now is if we are up for cleaning the mess that we have created with our own hands.