THE PLASTİC BOTTLE REVOLUTİON!

Imagine a two-bedroom home with a bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room made from 14,000 plastic bottles and mud. Sounds like a fantasy, right? In the United States alone, 47 billion plastic bottles are discarded annually, and, worldwide, enough plastic is thrown out in a single year to circle the globe four times. However, a form of construction being used throughout Africa and Latin America is making a difference, not only by reducing plastic waste, but also by taking advantage of the durability of plastic bottles to provide shelter for the homeless. The “bottle wall technique”, developed by German firm Ecotec Environmental Solutions, has been training people in Nigeria, where 16 million people are homeless, to build homes out of plastic bottles. The process is simple: Bottles are collected and filled with sand. Then they are stacked on their sides and bound together with mud or a cement mix, creating solid walls. The structures are well insulated, incredibly strong (20 times stronger than brick), fire resistant, and even bulletproof. A typical two-bedroom home with a toilet, a kitchen, and a living room requires 14,000 plastic bottles, and costs a quarter of what a conventional house would. An increasing number of communities around the world are experimenting with the technology. An Ecotec house in Ecoparque El Zamorano, Honduras, was built with 8,000 bottles without using cement, and it supports a green roof that weighs up to 30 tonnes when wet. Ecotec plastic-bottle greenhouses, office partitions, sheds, benches, walls, and community centres are also popping up in Tokyo, the United States, Europe, and South America. Design-wise, multi-hued bottle caps protrude from the walls for a colourful effect, and exposed rows and sections allow light to filter through the structures. Ecotec even created the world’s first vaulted ceiling made out of plastic bottles in Honduras. This type of environmentally friendly construction requires a community effort. The bottles must be recovered through massive clean-up efforts and recycling drives, and filling each one with sand often involves many hands. While this construction technique is now being used in developing countries across the world, some think it makes sense to use it in all countries with high homeless numbers. Only time will tell if this eco-friendly housing revolution catches on in the West. (Reading text adapted from takepart)