A woman in Brazil has built a house using discarded glass bottles for the walls. The home in São Paulo state uses around 6,000 bottles, which are laid on their side and secured with cement.
Ivone Martins had the idea after coming across a large number of dumped bottles in her neighbourhood of Itaoca, and decided that using them would both help the environment and greatly reduce her construction costs. The 3-metre-high house has a footprint of 72 square metres, and the owner has also used the bottle and cement combination to fashion furniture such as a bed and a sofa. She intends to use other recycled materials for further improvements and additions.
Brazil has a poor recycling infrastructure, with less than 7% of its municipalities having official services. Much of the recyclable waste that is recovered is collected by waste-pickers, who sell the material to private recycling companies.
Meanwhile, in 2011 it was reported that a house in Nigeria built using plastic bottles filled with sand was attracting tourists to the village of Yelwa. Following this popularity, further houses were built in the neighbourhood using the same method, with the bottles bound with mud for structural security. More than 25 houses have been built from the collected bottle waste, with the help of a grant from the UN Refugee Agency after floods in 2015 and 2016 destroyed the villagers’ existing homes.
Like Brazil, Nigeria has a largely informal waste management system.
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A woman in Brazil has built a house using discarded glass bottles for the walls. The home in São Paulo state uses around 6,000 bottles, which are laid on their side and secured with cement.
Ivone Martins had the idea after coming across a large number of dumped bottles in her neighbourhood of Itaoca, and decided that using them would both help the environment and greatly reduce her construction costs. The 3-metre-high house has a footprint of 72 square metres, and the owner has also used the bottle and cement combination to fashion furniture such as a bed and a sofa. She intends to use other recycled materials for further improvements and additions.
Brazil has a poor recycling infrastructure, with less than 7% of its municipalities having official services. Much of the recyclable waste that is recovered is collected by waste-pickers, who sell the material to private recycling companies.
Meanwhile, in 2011 it was reported that a house in Nigeria built using plastic bottles filled with sand was attracting tourists to the village of Yelwa. Following this popularity, further houses were built in the neighbourhood using the same method, with the bottles bound with mud for structural security. More than 25 houses have been built from the collected bottle waste, with the help of a grant from the UN Refugee Agency after floods in 2015 and 2016 destroyed the villagers’ existing homes.
Like Brazil, Nigeria has a largely informal waste management system.