The Vision Ecobrick Guide 3.0 is now available for free download (charaters by El Tiburon Grande).

The Vision Ecobrick Guide 3.0 is now available for free download (charaters by El Tiburon Grande).

The Ecobrick team is proud and excited to announce the launch of the Vision Ecobrick 3.0 Guide.  The culmination of two and half years of intense on the ground work with communities in the Philippines and our global partners, this guide lays out the essentials to Ecobricking your home, school and community.  The simple, accessible, opensource and imminently shareable 19 page guide can be downloaded free, printed and photocopied to your heart’s (and the planet’s) delight!

The guide takes the experience, trials and errors of ecobrickers around the world and boils it down to a succint yet comprehensive resource for teachers, principals, community leaders and anyone interest in truly transcending trash and pollution once and for all.  The guide not only lays out the best methods of ecobricking, visioning and community mobilization, but also the core principles of deeply sustainable, zero-waste living.

Version 3.0 features powerful new illustrations that make clear the perils of plastic (art by Jo Stodgel)

Version 3.0 features powerful new illustrations that make clear the perils of plastic (art by Jo Stodgel)

We’ve actually reduced the number of pages in v3.0 for a more focused guide to the principles and essentials of packing a bottle (it sounds simple, but when ecobricking in your area goes viral, you want to be sure you’ve started doing it right!).  Detailed bottle construction methods have been transfered  to a second guidebook that focuses on Ecobrick construction.  The beta-version of the Ecobrick Construction Guide is now also available on our site for download.  This second guidebook is intended for schools that have been ecobricking for several months and are now ready for the next step of planning, building and gardening.

We’re also super excited to unveil an online Wiki version of our Ecobrick guide.  Here, each page of our the v3.0 guide has been uploaded to our WordPress Wiki– an online platform that allows anyone anywhere to discuss, propose edits, fixes and revisions, and to make these revisions (with a free Ecobricks.org account).  Not only will this allow us to dramatically improve and add content to our guides, but it will also allow crowdsourced translations.  Should you wish to make the VEB guide available in your region and language, we can help you mobilize and direct translators to the wiki.  everal translators can have a guide translated in a matter of days.  Once ready, the content can be easily inserted into our also freely available Publisher Source Files.

The Vision Ecobrick Guide was first launched in the Northern, Philippines to a hand full of pilot schools.  After two years of exponential and viral spread, gardens, parks and homes are being built with Ecobricks and litter and dumpsites have been dramatically reduced.  Today, over 200,000 students in the Cordillera Administrative Region are ecobricking.  A small international team of commited trash transcenders have seen the VEB Guide through to its current release.  A big thanks to the artists, illustrators, writers, translators, wordpressers, administrators, principals, and most of all the students who have seen us through to the launch of this powerful document.

Check out the new guides for yourself on our download page.  Share and let folks know that there is a solution– that starts now, with our hands.