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The Global Ecobrick Alliance finds its roots in the mountains of the remote Northern Philippines. In 2010, on a vacation gone wrong, Canadian artist Russell Maier became stranded in a small village in the Sabangan Valley, in the land of the Igorot people. Unable to make ends meet and return home, Russell— an artist with a background in philosophy— was compelled to make his home in the Cordilleras for five years.

Living in the community, he began to wonder what was happening to the plastic bottles, packaging and other items he was consuming and throwing away. Following his neighbours as they gathered and carried away the neighbourhood waste, he discovered his plastic was being dumped into the local Chico River, near where the children swam and the men fished. Disturbed by this, he began experimenting with upcycling— refurbishing his home with plastic creations and selling them abroad. But he was haunted by one question: what happens when these plastic creations come to their end? Was the plastic problem really being solved?

Around this time, Russell was introduced to the work of Andreas Froese, who had been filling bottles with sand in Central America to make “bottle bricks”. Russell and his friends headed down to the Chico River to try the technique. The spot where they gathered sand happened to be where the local plastic was dumped and burned— so they improvised, packing a mix of sand and plastic into the bottles. It worked just as well, so they added more and more plastic. With a mix of bottles— some packed with sand, some packed solely with plastic— they built a small garden wall. Not only were the plastic-filled bottles just as effective, they had the added benefit of securing plastic that would otherwise have washed into the river.

Russell continued the experiment at home, building his garden with them. His neighbours wanted to know more, so he worked with the town school to clean up an old pile of plastic. Word spread quickly, and the idea was met with overwhelming enthusiasm— first in their town, then in neighbouring towns. As plastic waste management reached a crisis point in Bontoc, the provincial capital, demand grew for an accessible solution. Russell and Irene Bakisan developed the first Vision Ecobrick Guidebook— a simple, photocopiable resource distributed to hundreds of schools. By 2014, almost three thousand schools had implemented the ecobricks program across the Northern Philippines Department of Education.

The development of ecobrick concepts was deeply influenced by Igorot principles. Inspired by a stone rice-terrace wall that had collapsed in a storm and was rebuilt using the very same stones, Russell and Irene were determined that ecobrick constructions should also be reusable over and over again. Inspired by the concept of Ayyew, the team prioritized using ecobricks for building green spaces that would enrich neighbourhoods and schools.

With the launch of Ecobricks.org in 2013, the Filipino ecobrick movement discovered that people around the world— desperate for a simple solution to plastic— had begun ecobricking independently. After making contact with movement leaders in South Africa and North and Central America, it was decided to form an alliance to establish consistency across the growing global movement. Spearheaded by Russell Maier, Jo Stodgel (Upcycle Santa Fe), Candice Mostert, Patricia Acuna and Irene Bakisan, the Global Ecobrick Alliance (GEA) was formed alongside the Vision Ecobrick Guidebook v2.0. In 2014, with the support of Ian Domisse, founder of the Ecobrick Exchange in South Africa, the alliance agreed to use the non-hyphenated, lower-case term “ecobrick” as the standardized term across all materials— so that ecobrickers everywhere could rally around one word, one hashtag, and one search term.

In early 2015, the Vision Ecobrick Guide was translated into Indonesian by Nurkinanti Laraskusuma. At the end of 2015, Russell Maier and Ani Himawati officially founded the GEA as a not-for-profit Earth Enterprise, with the mission of supporting the technological and philosophical infrastructure of the global ecobrick movement. In 2016, the movement ignited in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Ani Himawati was instrumental in developing the GEA’s training methodology, applying the principles of mandalic community manifestation developed by Russell Maier— a methodology that has since carried the Indonesian movement to exponential growth through starter workshops, trainer-of-trainer programs, and ecobrick convergences.

The ecobrick movement in the UK ignited shortly after the airing of Blue Planet II in December 2017. In January 2018, Mary Bacoo and Lucie Mann joined the GEA as trainers from the UK. Lucie started the Ecobricks UK Facebook page, which took off in October 2018 as concurrent scandals in the UK recycling industry broke in the news and sent ecobricking viral. Today there are 30+ GEA Trainers in the UK and hundreds of thousands of ecobrickers there.

“We don’t understand how it happens, but with Blue Planet II, suddenly the world was electrified about the crime of chucking plastic into the ocean.”

— David Attenborough

Over 2017–18, hundreds of trainers joined the GEA network across the Philippines, Indonesia, and South Africa through our live and online trainer-of-trainer programs. In 2018, our first three USA trainers— Sabrina Auclair, Luke Henkel and Jess Beck— joined the team.