Plan For Plastic

06/28/2025

The first permanent Ecobale / Ubuntu-Blox structure in the USA is getting plastered! 1800 pounds of plastic in the walls, diverted from the Caja Del Rio landfill in Santa Fe in partnership with a dozen local businesses!

Reach out if you would like to come for a visit or volunteer (40 minutes from Santa Fe) and please follow us on Facebook and YouTube - we're sitting on a whole lot of footage to share of the building process! Thank you for your support :)

06/19/2025

Greetings to all the people out there who follow this page and support our work with getting repurposed plastic buildings off the ground! Please follow us on YouTube and spread the good word about Ecobales far and wide.

Here is a project we did in Utah back in 2018. More videos on the way and a whole series on how we built our Ecobale Shed which we are getting plastered now in Northern New Mexico. Cheers and thank you!

In December of 2018 Upcycle Santa Fe (now Plan For Plastic) visited Moab, Utah to work on an Ubuntu-Blox (Ecobale) project with several organizations. The lo...

10/24/2024

Lathing the corners, and doing the bullnoses on the french doors and window of the Ecobale Shed a few weeks back with my dad. I think it's going to be too cold soon to get the exterior plastered this year but who knows!

The walls of this structure are built with nearly 2000 pounds of bagged and baled plastics collected from a dozen businesses in Santa Fe, NM. Plans and designs are in the works for the wooden Ecobale Press and this structure and will be available next year.

As of late I've been working on what feels like the never ending saga of finishing the glass bottle brick windows, using a new method that I'm calling the Stodgy Stack. I came up with the idea because I didn't want all the weight of mortar mix or cob on the top plate and walls, and some added insulation (more loose plastics around the bottles) sounded good too.

In place of mortar, 1.5" x 1.5" x .5" wood / OSB spacers are cut and construction adhesive is used to stick them in place. Then the gaps are filled with loose plastics or spray foam, leaving an inch or so on the interior and exterior for plaster or cob.

I'm documenting the process and will get a video up on YouTube in a few months. Stodgy because it's an old nickname and also inspired by the British term meaning dense and hard to digest. Thanks for reading!

08/13/2024

Hi everyone! It's been a while and I wanted to give an update and a bit of an intro about myself and the work with plastic moving forward. My name is Jo Stodgel and I am the founder of Upcycle Santa Fe which has since been rebranded into Plan 4 Plastic. I am currently finishing up a 120 sq ft structure, the walls of which are made with nearly 2000 pounds of plastic.

I was paid a small fee to collect this plastic every month from a dozen businesses in Santa Fe, NM for a few years. Businesses could put any and all plastics in our collection bags as long as they were clean and dry. The plastic was then layered and stuffed in 2 cubic ft feed bags. Two of these full bags were placed in the Ubuntu-Blox or Ecobale Press and compressed into a 2 cubic ft building bale.

These Ubuntu-Blox / Ecobales are the invention of Texas based craftsman Harvey Lacey, who demonstrated this building solution in Haiti following the landslides there in 2010. Several earthquake-proof structures were built there with a lot of local help and a whole lot of Styrofoam cleaned up from their waterways. Harvey came to Santa Fe in 2014 to share the work with us, build a press out of reclaimed wood, and build a wall out of Styrofoam Ecobales. Shortly after this we started making bales with mixed plastics as a way to deal with the entirety of the plastic waste stream.

I've been researching and working with plastic upcycling since 2009, and have yet to find a more accessible and effective way of dealing with large amounts of plastic than these Ecobales. A sense of urgency has always been present with this work, knowing that these materials which can be of great value are thrown away in mass on the daily and left to become pollutants. At present the Ecobale solution is still largely unknown and I think there are less than 10 Ecobale Presses on Earth.

With the official launch of Plan 4 Plastic I hope to change that. Our focus will be on education and spreading the word about Ecobales (and other open source solutions) to empower communities to address the plastic waste dilemma. More info about it all soon, and thank you for reading!

07/24/2023

Ecobales! Shown here is the compression, leveling and anchoring of the laminated wood top plate to lock the structure together. The walls are composed of about 1600 pounds of bagged, compressed and baled mixed plastics from our past plastic collection services in Santa Fe.

These Ecobales are laid in between rebar verticals and each course is secured with horizontal wiring. Once the top plate is in place the rebar uprights are anchored to it and heavy duty braided wire is looped from anchor points in the footings and over the top of the walls.

Ecobales, also known as Ubuntu-Blox, are the invention of Harvey Lacey and were first demonstrated in Haiti following the earthquakes in 2010. With his projects he built an outstanding answer to the question "How do we make earthquake safe buildings with readily available materials?" Several buildings were made there with bagged and bailed styrofoam. Later a small portable shed was built and tested in Texas for seismic resistance and withstood everything that was thrown at it with no structural damage.

Since being introduced to the open source Ecobale tech in 2014, we have built 5 wooden Ecobale Presses (4 are roaming) and are excited to share our designs with the world soon! Through this amazing and simple solution we have managed to create a successful pilot project in Northern New Mexico for plastic upcycling and build something really cool. Did I mention that this is open source?? So please like and share and know that every piece of plastic that goes in the trash could go in a structure like this! Thank you for reading :)

04/23/2023

Happy Earth Day to the world! It's been quite some time since we've posted here but we're still here working with plastic in Northern New Mexico and excited to share some new projects soon! We are in the process of rebranding to Plan 4 Plastic and revamping our website so stay tuned!

02/03/2023

Resharing this article that was originally published in the Green Fire Times about a year ago. It's a great overview of this plastic work we are so passionate about!

I wrote this article for the local publication Green Fire Times for their Nov/Dec issue in 2021. I am reprinting it here to have it in an easier to read format, provide some links where appropriate…

11/15/2022

Working today to get organized, upgraded and back online sharing all the good works that are being done to upcycle plastics around the world! We started in on some big changes to the website and made our Twitter account today if you want to follow us on there. Away from the computers we have been working on a structure outside of Santa Fe, NM made with 1500 pounds of reclaimed plastics collected from local businesses and are excited to share lots of pictures and details in the Spring! Thanks for following us and believing in the work we do!

07/10/2021

Hi everyone! We are in the process of rebranding Upcycle Santa Fe into Plan 4 Plastic. This is going to take a bit of time but we are really excited about it and hope you are too! We got to hear a lot of feedback throughout the years regarding our name Upcycle Santa Fe. A lot of people thought we were a bicycle shop. A lot of people have no experience with the word upcycle. So it was tough to explain.

The vision for Upcycle Santa Fe in the beginning was to create a waste management center to upcycle all sorts of materials, including food waste, glass and metal. Through it all though the most important issue has been and will always be plastic, and showing people what they can do with it. Thus this rebrand and Plan 4 Plastic.

Also a more focused effort on education and casting the seeds of this knowledge far and wide. This has been the most successful aspect of our work. We have built Ubuntu-Blox presses here in Santa Fe as well as in Utah and Costa Rica, and have helped others build them in Africa and India. It's the teach a man to fish kind of thing and it absolutely makes the most sense. This is the power of open source!

The research and work will continue here in Santa Fe. We've said it before many times but if you want to build something with plastic then we'd like to help! The possibilities are endless and hot damn we have to start dealing with these plastics in a good way. So stay tuned and thank you Santa Fe and all of our followers around the world. Let's make some good work happen and make rehabilitation a celebration. With love, the Plan 4 Plastic crew.