NIGERIA'S ECO-FRIENDLY PLASTIC BOTTLE HOUSE

NIGERIA'S ECO-FRIENDLY PLASTIC BOTTLE HOUSE

In today’s consumer world, and particularly here in our country Nigeria, plastic is everywhere from plentiful stores of bottled water to disposable plastic ware and containers that hold our store-bought food. It seems like you can’t go out shopping without running into a good deal of plastic. And while this material is strong, reliable, and undoubtedly useful, we also may have way too much of the stuff that isn’t being reused. It is not enough to persuade people to use less, plastic needs to be re-purposed and reused to be kept out of landfills. Recycling plastic uses much less energy than creating new plastic, and it conserves our valuable resources.

This unfortunate reality has spurred many to get creative with the discarded by products of society. Some have used plastic waste to construct marvelous sculptures and raise awareness about the issue, while others are re-purposing it entirely to construct Eco-friendly homes.

As phys.org reports, the housing crisis has become so bad in Nigeria, nearly 16 million units are required to address the shortage. Because crafting traditional homes would be far too expensive for most, locals adopted the idea put forth by two NGOs and are now building plastic bottle homes.

Yahaya Ahmed, CEO of Development Association for Renewable Energies (DARE), set out to build energy-autonomous houses from recycled materials. DARE have brought Andres Froesse, founder of Eco-Tec Soluciones Ambientales, the project is solving two problems at once by addressing the homelessness issue and helping the environment. Not only will there be less plastic in landfills, the house is designed to produce zero carbon emissions. In addition, the bottle house will be completely powered by solar panels, with a fuel-efficient clean cook stove, urine filtration fertilization systems and water purification tanks, thereby making it energy autonomous.

Nigeria's first house built from discarded plastic bottles is proving a tourist attraction in the village of Yelwa. While this building process is not native to Nigeria, packing sand into plastic bottles is a technique that started nine years ago in India, South and Central America. Named “bottle brick” technology, the compacted sand inside the bottles is almost 20 times stronger than bricks. The best part is that in a region that does not have much money to spend on building materials, the houses are estimated to cost 1/3 of a house made of concrete and bricks.

Adding to the appeal of the simple technology, the houses are ideal for the hot Nigerian climate because the bottle bricks buffer the house from the intense heat providing a comfortable temperature all year round. That’s not all: for a region known for violence, the houses are acclaimed to be completely bullet proof, fireproof and can withstand earthquakes.

To create a two-bedroom bottle house, workers fill plastic bottles with sand and then hold them together using mud and cement. The buildings can be built to three stories, but no higher, due to the weight of the sand-filled bottles.

A two-bedroom house requires 14,000 bottles to complete. To put this into perspective, Nigeria throws away three million bottles every day. Clearly, there are plenty of bottles which can be re-purposed to build every individual in their own abode.