Ecobrick Media Resource Kit

Cover the Good News about Solving Personal Plastic with the right facts, ideas and words.

We’re all tired of hearing the bad news about plastic pollution. Interested in helping spread the word about the exciting spread and co-creative innovations happening in the ecobricks movement? Awesome. We are at your service to help you create a great and inspiring story.

Covering ecobricks is not going to be easy. The core concepts of ecobricks literally go against most people’s ideas about plastic. We have put together this kit to help you craft your coverage of the ecobrick concepts and movement. There are a lot of great stories about what people are doing with ecobricks– but paramount is spreading the correct core ideas, principles and wording– which in fact make ecobricks the awesome, new-paradigm solution to plastic that it is.

The first thing about ecobricks that makes it different, is that it is an inescapably personal solution.

This is not another government program, or some big proprietary tech that will make plastic pollution magically disappear in a few years. Its not something that other people do, or you tell people to do. It is the direct opposite. It is something that everyone can do themselves, right now. Including journalists. We suggest that you take your time and go through the process of saving and weighing your own plastic consumed over a month and making an ecobrick, before doing your story on ecobricks.

Misconceptions

That said, since many journalists keep themselves quite busy, we have put together a list of the main errors that are made about ecobricks:

“Ecobricks are made with plastic trash”— You’ll notice on this site we never use the word ‘trash’. Instead, ecobricks turn plastic into a resource. Please do not connect ecobricks with “trash” or “garbage”.
“Ecobricks are for building schools and homes”— Although you can build structures with them, 99% of ecobricks are being used for small home, school and community creations. We focus on tiny applications, like furniture models, Lego, and especially gardens.
“Ecobricks are for developing countries and poor people”— Ecobricks are for anyone who wants to take responsibility for their plastic, and are relevant around the world. Right now, after David Attenborough’s recent BBC documentary, we have tons of people in the UK making ecobricks — they have realized that recycling doesn’t work and sending their plastic to Asia is not a solution.
“Ecobricks are for places where recycling isn’t an option” — Ecobricks are ideal for places with recycling. Ecobricks help keep plastic out of the recycling industry! Recycling is not deep a solution for plastic. Recycling inevitably sends plastic on a one way trip to the biosphere.

Spelling

In 2016, ecobrick leaders around the world confered and agreed that our concept deserved its own full fledged and normalized word. We agreed to spell the word ‘ecobrick‘, as one word, non-hyphenated, and without any spaces or capitalization. This spelling is now accepted throughout the movement and the word used on the ecobricks, wikipedia entry.

Video and Photo Source Files

All our videos and photos on this site and on our YouTube channel are available for you to use under our Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. We ask that all usage is attributed to Ecobricks.org. This is absolutely key. Anyone who shares the ecobrick message (including and especially us) has the moral obligation to ensure the reference to best ecobrick practices and the core principles. This is why we started our Ecobricks.org site and have worked hard to put all our materials up for free and widespread access. Please clearly indicate Ecobricks.org in your coverage. For videos, please close with this link. For Facebook videos and social media posts, pinning a post with this link is requested.

We have a Dropbox repository of all our video files. This includes many HD clips and sequences that are not on our YouTube channel and higher resolution versions of the originals. Please contact us using the form below and we can send this to you.

Interviews

We’re happy to answer your questions personally! Through email or through Skype videos. Or in many cases we can put you in touch with an Ecobrick mover and shaker in your own country. Use the form below to contact us. The email is monitored daily.