Hundreds of people – including government officials and traditional leaders – have been coming to see how the walls are built in the round architectural shape popular in northern Nigeria.
The bottles, packed with sand, are placed on their side, one on top of the other and bound together with mud.
Wikipedia has a whole entry on “bottle walls”
One of the more interesting parts was Mr. Heineken’s idea of designing a bottle that could then be used as a brick.
Prototypes were made but the idea never went anywhere.
Here is a article about it: http://x.co/azfK
Is there anything to keep them together? Any concrete?
With precious few building materials at hand, this sounds ideal. The bottles are cast offs, that aren’t of much use for anything else. And until (or if) they ever break down, they’ll hold loose sand as a brick-like unit. Without the need to bake them, using fuel they can’t spare (or don’t have). It may not last as long as real bricks. But we’re taking Nigeria, where land ownership is likely very temporary.
The only thing I’d suggest is that they redesign the bottles to be more square, rather than round. So they require less “mortal” to be set as a wall. And they won’t roll with the wind, when they’re empty and discarded. Making them squarer would increase their volume a bit. So the bottlers would either have to reduce their size, to compensate. Or dilute the product (some more) and tell you it’s what the public wants. Extra Lite whatever. In the case of bottled water, just more water.
The Mother Earth News in the late 70′s and into the 80′s was big on what they called cordwood construction. Cutting logs into 6 to 8 inch lengths then using them on their sides like bricks with mortar.
‘Course for any given wall the log chunks would all be the same length. I don’t know if they ever did any testing for how fire resistant, or not, such walls were.
Then wood got real expensive and this sort of construction was looking quite wasteful.
Juhu. Very good use. Get rid of the plastic and not pollute the Earth
Water bottles are a part of American Culture. People are concerned about the water they drink while away from home. With plastic water bottles which are the most accessable and affordable to the most people, there is a problem as far as waste is concerned. The first answer when there is a problem is to ban something; but this is a step in the right direction to find a solution to a problem rather than just to ban it!
This is such an interesting idea! This reminds me of the project that a group of students from Philippines undertook where they made light out of waste plastic bottles. Super amazing guys, let’s come up with more ideas like these.
Indeed interesting. George, it feels like you just stole the words from my mouth. The Filipino’s light project was exactly what I was thinking about when I saw this. This also reminds me of a person from Argentina who almost spent his lifetime educating people about the bad effects of plastic. He claims to have educated over 20000 people in showing how to build a house which is sturdy and fit to live. and he lives in one of them himself. Hope to see increase in number of these kinds of people.
Now, that’s creative. Perfect use for plastics that I can think of. Just imagine how many structures we can build out of the 25 billion bottles that we waste every year. Probably a few Mount Everests?
This is such a great way to use plastic bottles alternatively. I recall in one of the projects that I volunteered in my community in order to come up with alternative ways of using paper bags and plastic carriers, and some of the groups there came up with very interesting ideas and proposals. These ideas were also tested in terms of their feasibility so that these could be implemented in the community. One of the most outstanding ideas was to use the bags for sand bags during uneventful flooding (our area has recently experienced of some flooding because of the road construction).