Waste bottles for construction? Yes, it is difficult to think of a bottle as a brick. But a mud-filled bottle is as strong as a brick and whatever you can do with a brick, you can do with a bottle too.
This is an effective solution for reusing plastic.
Some of you might haven’t heard about the idea, but buildings made from plastic bottles have been standing anywhere across the globe. Buildings made from plastic bottles even have many benefits that ordinary buildings cannot achieve, and here we will talk about it.
- HOW PLASTIC IS DESTROYING OUR PLANET?
When you make a clay brick, the time and energy used right from mixing the clay to baking it in the kiln and taking into account the firewood used for that, you will see that the bottle brick is far more energy-efficient.
The technology also reduces the carbon emission that happens during the baking of an ordinary brick. The heat generation from cement factories can also be reduced as this technology uses only five percent cement. The foundation for the entire construction is obtained from building waste and so the mountains from which granite is blasted out can be saved too.
Average humans can consume 15 or more products packed in PET single-use plastic a month. If you were born after 1978, and live until 80 years old, you will leave behind a minimum of 14,400 plastic packagings on this planet. This plastic takes hundreds of years to break down into tiny pieces of plastic, never to completely disappear. Most of the waste is consumed by fish and birds, which has shortened their lifespans greatly.
If you live in a plastic bottle house of 100 square meters, then your house will be built reusing 14,000 plastic bottles. These upcycled bottles could neutralize the negative effect of your passage on this planet, and move closer to leaving only your “footprints”.
- HOW TO BUILD HOMES USING PLASTIC BOTTLES?
Basically, plastic bottles can be used to replace bricks to build a building. The method of making a house with bricks and plastic bottles are actually the same. The only difference is the shape, while bricks come in square, plastic bottles are round.
In addition, bricks are solid and hard, while plastic bottles are hollow and soft. That’s why before making a plastic bottle house, you need to solidify the bottles first. The technique is done by filling the bottles with fine dry sand.
You might think how can such a round surface being arranged in a stable formation. But there is a special technique in arranging the bottles like bricks, and the key is a thread. To arrange the bottles, you can tie a knot around the neck of the bottles so they don’t slide around.
By using this technique, you can get a stable arrangement of the bottles while you are making it permanent with plaster and other materials like broken bricks or other construction wastes. To make a simple house, about 8,000 to 14,000 bottles in all size needed.
- ADVANTAGES OF A PLASTIC BOTTLE BUILDINGS
There are many benefits you can get from buildings made from plastic bottle exceeding conventional buildings. That’s why, if you think that those who build such buildings are just environmentalists and eccentrics, you are wrong.
In fact, such buildings have been standing everywhere around the world, built by people who already recognized the benefits of plastic bottle buildings.
Bottles have the following advantages over bricks and other construction materials:
- Low cost – You know how much a bottle costs!
- Non-Brittle – (Unlike bricks)
- Absorbs abrupt shock loads – Since they are not brittle, there can take up heavy loads without failure.
- Bioclimatic
- Re-usable
- Less construction material
- Easy to build
- Green Construction
- CAN THIS BE THE ANSWER TO HOMELESSNESS PROBLEM?
Yes, if only the lack of housing were the problem. Amnesty International found that in 2011, empty houses outnumbered homeless families by five times. Still, a great way to build more sustainably around the world.
It’s not just an eccentric construction method for hippies and eco-warriors since the plastic bottle issue is a biggie. These bottles are polluting the world while they can be used to build homes for a fraction of the normal costs. You do have to bypass construction laws and find places without building codes though.
Plastic bottles waste, especially in developing countries is usually mounded in garbage piles. Some countries may have applied recycling programs for those plastic bottles, but the amount that they can recycle is still too low, only about 20% of it.
So, if you are planning on building a house someday, you might want to consider using plastic bottles as the materials. Thus, it would be not only you who can feel the benefits but also the rest of the world.
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