There is something therapeutic about stomping on a plastic container and hearing the crunch of the milk jug or salad clamshell crumpling underfoot. 

For a group in Taos, N.M., that gathered to build walls out of waste in the summer of 2020, crushing plastic by foot was more than a therapeutic exercise. It was an act of resistance during a nationwide recycling crisis. Five years later, the Repurposing ­Plastic Project is at a crossroads. 

RPP was born in 2019 when plastic recycling in the region was put on standstill. Like many municipalities across the United States, Taos had relied on the pipeline of recyclable plastics to China as the solution to dealing with its plastic waste.

When China stopped buying most of the United States’ plastics at the end of 2017, recycling collection centers across the United States suddenly had nowhere to send their materials, so they stopped collecting them. 

In the fall of 2019, residents of Taos were told they had no option but to send all their previously recycled plastics to the landfill. 

Todd Wynward, the director of Taos Initiative for Life Together, or TiLT, was horrified.

“Plastic is a forever chemical,” said Wynward, who is licensed by Mountain States Conference of Mennonite Church USA as a minister for creation justice and watershed discipleship. “It just gets broken down into little microplastics . . . but it never goes away at an atomic level.” 

Plastics have only been around since the 1930s, but the effects of microplastic contamination on animal and human health are already alarming.

In landfills, plastics degrade slowly, eventually becoming microplastics that can leach into surrounding waterways and blow away in the wind, carrying with them other toxins like heavy metals and antibiotics picked up at the dump. 

“Microplastics have become so much a part of our life,” Wynward said. “To know that they are in our bodies, that they’re in our mother’s milk, that they’re in the fish and they’re in the ocean, it makes me cry.” 

For three months after the shutdown, Wynward said he sat numbly, not sure how to respond.

“It felt like we lost our agency of doing the right thing,” he said. 

That’s when Doug Eichelberger, a local architect, approached Wynward with an idea. He had a concept of building with plastics but needed collaborators. 

The idea resonated with Wynward.

“Plastic is lightweight, strong, flexible, waterproof, in­sulative,” he said. “It is a building material, so why don’t we use it as such?” 

If they could entomb the plastics in cement walls, out of reach of sun, water and wind, Wynward thought, they could keep it from breaking down and contaminating the environment. 

This wasn’t Eichelberger’s first time exploring creative ways to repurpose waste into building materials. Over 30 years ago, while living in Colorado, he built two houses and a barn out of baled magazines and cardboard scraps. 

As a Mennonite, Eichelberger said, “I want to be a good steward of our planet. My wheelhouse is building things, so when I see a problem, like waste plastic or paper, I go to my tools and my toolbox and say, ‘What could we do? How can we make that work?’ ” 

His idea was to build rectangular baskets out of metal fencing and stuff them with crushed plastics.

TiLT — which Wynward describes as “an incubator for personal change and systemic change” — took on the project and invited volunteers to help build the first repurposed plastic structure, a shed in the nearby town of Questa, that summer. 

About 450 trash bags of plastics were donated by local residents, crushed by foot and packed between cattle panels to form the walls. A coating of stucco provided the finishing touch and sealed the plastic off from the elements. 

The building project made the front page of the Taos newspaper. Wynward said: “We had local politicians and people saying, ‘Hooray, there’s something we can do.’ ” 

Soon over 350 individuals and businesses were paying $5 a month to drop off bags of clean, sorted plastics at designated collection sites. 

Over the next few years, RPP grew into a business. They acquired a hydraulic baler (like those used at grocery stores to bale cardboard boxes) to make crushing more efficient. And they transitioned to producing modular walls — called Redi-Walls — that are 8 feet long, 50 inches tall and 16 inches thick and can be assembled like large bricks to build sheds, barns, studios, carports and outdoor walls. 

RPP has received contracts for a half dozen projects in the region, including an outdoor wall at an upscale hotel and a shed at the county recycling collection site (which has yet to resume accepting plastic). 

While Wynward, Eichelberger and others have done their best to drum up excitement through volunteer opportunities, demonstrations and a meeting attended by a hundred people in December, the customer base they need to continue operating the business hasn’t materialized. 

RPP stopped accepting plastic donations at the end of last year. With a hundred Redi-Walls waiting to be sold and enough plastic in storage to fill a hundred more, Wynward said: “We cannot keep collecting unless people start buying and building with our product.”

Randy Martinez, RPP’s operation manager, said there may be practical reasons the Redi-Walls haven’t caught on. Because of the labor involved in making them, they don’t cost any less than conventional building supplies. And they aren’t completely uniform. 

“They’re all made the same way,” Martinez said, “but there’s no system where we put a certain amount of this kind of plastic or that kind of plastic.” As a result, one wall, or “basket,” might be half an inch longer than another or have a slightly different shape or weight. 

“When you’re building and you’re a contractor,” Martinez said, “you have calculations in your head for certain materials . . . and our baskets are all a little different.” 

With an R value (insulating ­power) of 15, the Redi-Walls don’t meet code requirements for residential construction. 

Martinez said much more testing could be done to understand the product’s properties and lifespan.

“We haven’t been in the game long enough to have tangible evidence that this is going to have a future,” he said. “We don’t know how it’s going to last after five years of winters or 10 years.” 

Eichelberger’s experience shows cultural factors could be at play as well. 

Earlier in his career, he proposed multiple relief projects using trash or rubble to build temporary housing for victims of natural disasters.

In Haiti, the idea to build with rubble from buildings destroyed in an earthquake was nixed because locals believed the souls of those killed inside were still present in the concrete.

In Nepal, his proposal to build homes using plastic waste was rejected because the caste system didn’t allow those in higher classes to live in structures built out of lower classes’ trash. 

Wynward doesn’t think repurposing plastic in Taos is over, but its future will look different.

“My role,” he said, “is [to be] an imagination person, to start the conversation, to let people even realize they could build with plastic.” He added: “This is a nonprofit, and we’re not suited to keep it as a business.” 

While no longer actively collecting plastic, RPP is still open for contracts and is looking for others to pick up the baton. A couple of prospects for collaboration are on the horizon. 

“What we’ve done,” Wynward said, “is imagine a way to use the plastic, but [other people] should be able to take our rough ideas and improve them. We don’t think we have the solution, but rather a step.”

Sierra Ross Richer is a freelance writer and farmer from Goshen, Ind. She is the author of the “Climate Pollinator” series for the Anabaptist Climate Collaborative and writes on the topics of climate change and sustainability in her Substack, “Sierra’s Adventures in Sustainability.” This article is the second in a series on faith-based action caring for the land and environment.