First VOC tests

Test setup at the facilities of TüV Reihnland, Arnhem

Next to the danger of fire, another question we often got were health-related. People thought plastic wasn’t good for you to live in. This seemed to be directly related with the image plastic has gotten over time: the microplastics, the plastic soup or in general the plastic waste once sees everywhere….all are bad connotations to a basically high quality material.

We went to TüV Reihnland in Arnhem where they could do a so called Volatile Organic compound test (VOC) to measure the amounts of toxic compounds that vaporise from the unibricks. We used our “Maas plastic” brick, of which we assumed to be the dirtiest (during shredding a bottle of chloride turned out to be still partly filled).

After the tests we passed on the majority of the criteria except for a couple. The expert explained that we hardly over rid the norm and that the source wasn’t the chloride, but paper and glue traces, in other words; the labels. This was something we could get rid of by proper sorting!