A big THANK YOU to the hundreds of ecobrickers who have been helping us validate a backlog of tens of thousands on ecobricks on GoBrik! We’ve now totally caught up — 100% are now validated. The hundreds of pending pages are now down to just one!!
This is valuable in a whole bunch of ways! First, our stats are now way stronger. The fact that almost 30,000 ecobricks have now been peer reviewed as to whether their plastic has been properly packed, means that we can now confidently claim to have collectively secured 6,738 Kg of plastic from the environment (woohoo!). Second, the process of review has provided invaluable feedback to those getting started ecobricking (Yes, it can be a little depressing having your ecobrick rejected, but we found that most rose to the challenge, and improved their ecobricking). And finally, now that the backlog has been chopped, rather than months of delay between logging and getting feedback, we’re now down to hours!
Back when I first discovered ecobricking as a means to take care of my plastic, I observed that the schools that I shared ecobricking with were far more likely to succeed if they kept track of the ecobricks coming in. Back then, that meant a clipboard and pen. The teachers would record the weight, name, volume and date of each ecobrick. These schools then had the numbers to share their success and keep track of their plastic transition. Their ecobricking then didn’t fade as a fad… but rather become part of deep plastic awakening and transition. I just got some amazing photos of the food forest play park that one of these schools built five years ago with their logged ecobricks. It’s still going strong and so is their ecobricking (although there is less plastic to ecobrick now!).
A big thanks also to the spontaneous, yet focused and dedicated Ecobricks UK-GEA – Development & Support team that rose up to help us deal with all the bugs and bumps with our beta authentication system. Remember the old days when the validation system took 2 minutes per ecobrick? 
Thanks to your persistence and patience, and countless ecobricks you reviewed, you got us through the back log and greatly helped us improve the authentication system!
And of course a big thanks to the GEA Development team who have been working on testing and improving that system — from beta testing, debugging, database revision, and server setup for almost a year now. Nobody gets paid to any of this high end work — yet somehow we’ve manifest an app and block chain generation system generating immense ecological value — and 6.7 tons is just a scratch on the surface of the potential plastic securing that lies ahead.
And since there are no ads, sponsors, or capitalization going on here, a big thank you to all our supporters who have chipped in large and small. Your energetic encouragement has helped us pay the bills and miraculously keep our servers spinning and database churning month after month, so that our tens of thousands of users can keep logging, and we can continue building the system.
Not only has our team been improving the system though, we’ve also been working on the conceptual infrastructure behind it. Stay tuned, shortly we’ll be releasing our Ecobrick & Brikcoin whitepaper. Authenticated ecobricked plastic isn’t just the foundation of solid stats– it has the potential for much more.
