What If Plastic Waste Became Part of the Built Environment?

Plastic is one of the most useful materials ever created. Lightweight, durable, versatile, and inexpensive. Those same qualities have also created one of our most persistent environmental challenges.

While some plastics can be successfully recycled, the reality is that most cannot — at least not easily. Flexible packaging, mixed plastics, and contaminated materials have very few options. More than 90% end up in landfill. So what if, instead of treating this plastic simply as waste, we started looking at it as a resource?

At Resolve Plastics Recycling, that question has shaped our approach from the beginning.

From Plastic Waste to Building Material

Conventional recycling depends on separating plastics into clean, consistent streams. The rest often goes to the landfill or is burned.  There is a better way. 

Resolve Plastics sees the opportunity to put difficult-to-recycle plastic to work in durable, long-term applications.  That opportunity is the built environment.

Resolve is pioneering the RPMachine — a machine designed to process mixed waste plastics of any resin type, in a single pass, without sorting or pre-treatment, and transform them into R-Blocks. Strong, resilient building blocks made entirely from difficult-to-recycle plastic, the same size and shape as a standard concrete masonry block — but lighter, more insulative, easier to work with, and far less carbon-intensive to produce.

The goal isn't simply to divert plastic from our landfills and environment. It's to transform a difficult waste stream into something with genuine, lasting value.

Where Could R-Blocks Be Used?

R-Blocks are designed to be familiar. They are the same size as a cinder block. They are easy to stack, cut, drill, and fasten with standard tools. No mortar is required.

Their potential applications are broad — retaining walls, wind and noise barriers, roadway barriers, landscaping, stormwater and irrigation infrastructure, agricultural structures, utility buildings, and domestic buildings up to three storeys.

These are practical, long-lived applications that could keep significant volumes of plastic in productive use for decades.

Instead of asking how do we get rid of this plastic? we can ask: where can this material continue to provide value for the next 50 to 100 years?

What About Microplastics?

It's a fair and important question.

Plastic can break down into smaller particles through prolonged exposure to UV, weather, and abrasion. R-Blocks consolidate mixed plastic into a dense, durable product, which is clad or coated to protect against direct UV exposure. In most building applications, the R-Block would sit behind a finished exterior surface — much like other structural building materials.

Durability and long-term environmental performance are central to our testing and certification process.

Designing for Circularity

For us, circularity means thinking beyond recycling something once.

R-Blocks are designed to be assembled into structures, recovered, and potentially reused. At end of life, the material can become feedstock again — reprocessed through the RPMachine into new R-Blocks. Or if other technologies advance in the meantime, there may eventually be other options for recycling that don’t exist today.

Plastic waste → useful material → building product → reuse → material again.

The longer we keep a material performing a useful function, the longer we preserve its value — and the less new material the world needs to produce.

Building Toward Commercial Scale

Turning this idea into an industrial solution requires more than making a block. It requires technology capable of processing difficult-to-recycle plastic feedstocks — efficiently, consistently, and at a cost that competes with simply sending plastic to landfill.

That's what the RPMachine is designed to do. Processing up to 3 tonnes of unsorted mixed plastic per hour, at an operating cost projected to be lower than landfill, and producing a building material ready for real-world use in a single pass.

We are continuing to develop and validate the RPMachine, refine the block-forming process, and advance R-Blocks toward certification and commercial application — with the support of partners including Alberta Innovates, Emissions Reduction Alberta, SAIT and other national agencies.

There is still work ahead. But the possibility is compelling — and the interest from municipalities, waste operators, and builders who have seen what we are building suggests the market agrees.

What If?

What if some of the plastic we struggle to recycle today could become a retaining wall, a barn, a noise barrier, or part of the infrastructure of a community?

What if plastic waste could become part of what we build tomorrow?

That's the possibility we're working to resolve.