2020 Edition

Pet Brick is project that explores possibilities of creating a second life for plastic PET bottle.

PET bottle is a technological marvel. Its extremly light with minimum of material but its very strong and it can withstand high pressures. Both from outside and from within.
Despite its unique capabilities its meant to be thrown out after single use.
Its life is measured by minutes. Its a shame.

Im a designer with long experience designing pet bottles and i teamed up with two architects with goal of turning a problematic single use plastic product into multipurpose object with long life and adittional benefits.
People around the world, especially in developed countries had been recognising potential of PET bottles and used them in construction and simple architecture.
I wanted to take this idea further and design special bottle that can work as a functional construction unit. The PET-Brick.

Design development took so far 4 years and several prototype stages. PET bricks have the original interlocking system that makes them stronger and at the same time allows them to be stacked on the top of each other.
System allows for different types of brick bonding patterns including 90 degree corners.
surface of a brick is designed to maximise rigidity, while enhancing optical and aesthetic quality of a resulting wall structure.

Applications can range from serious or permanent scenarios, to temporary solutions. In life saving scenario PET bricks can be used in cases of natural disaster stricken areas, where there is need of water supply as well as construction material to build from. Bottles can be brought in and after water is consumed, they can be filled with local dirt or sand to become heavy functional bricks. Building of smaller outdoor structures or tents is possible for various temporary events or permanent purposes. In indoors, bricks can work as a space dividing elements. Keeping the light in the space thanks to its transparency. Partition walls are possible in office or public space settings.

Benefits of the design in the packaging segment.
Optimalization of shape along with interlocking system might have even more important implications within beverage production and distribution itself.
Thanks to its rectangular shape with a short neck that can be inserted into bottom of the neighbour bottle, the space is much more efficiently filled with product than with standard bottle. That means more products can travel in one truck, lowering carbon footprint. Interlocking system makes much more stable block of products that “stand on their own” That might allow to further lower amount of plastic needed for shrink wrapping during transport. Potentially saving thousands even millions of tones of plastic.

Packaging is a field where key thing is scaling. The whole packaging industry fights for every gram of material everywhere, because everything gets multiplied by millions of sold pieces. Thats why unfortunately most/all of new alternative/natural packaging design solutions do not usually work, because they become unefficient, unavailable, carbon footprint heavy and expensive when scaled up.
We know for sure that for some time, plastics are here to stay with us, but till we find better alternative, we cannot give up on innovation. Every incremental evolution and enhancement counts. and is multiplied by million. PET brick is an honest effort to look at the bottle in a different way. And its made to acommodate further development in
materials that will be coming from scientific and chemical fields.