Can We Build With Garbage?

That’s the big, eco-friendly idea behind ByFusion, which turns plastic waste into construction material.

- By Jason Feifer

WHAT’S IN A BLOCK

ByFusion’s machines work fast: In minutes, they fuse up to 30 pounds of plastic into a single block—and that’s any plastic, from cups to bags to fishing wire. Nothing is melted. “When you cut these blocks in half, you can see every piece of plastic in there,” Kujawa says. “It’s just steam and compression.” ByFusion’s smallest machines can process up to 100 tons of plastic per month.

Plastic is not created equally,” says Heidi Kujawa, CEO of ByFusion. “It’s super complex, which is why this problem is really broken.”

The very short version of the problem goes like this: Despite all those triangle-arrow recycling symbols on the bottom of your bottles, most plastic is not recyclable. And the stuff that is often isn’t recycled anyway, because the process is dirty and cumbersome. Which means your recycling bin may be emptied into a landfill.