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.
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Poor people all over the World make use of cheap available resources. This particular case is not so good as UV will (particularly in Africa) degrade and crumble the bottles yielding falling-down houses (this is not permanent housing solution or even a long term one). Similar things are done all over with glass bottles for decades (and those are potentially longer living).
Plastic bottle s should be recycled as material is easily reusable. This case is not the best way to do it.
I don’t think the main problem will be UV deterioration of the plastic, but rather the part about “bound together with mud.”
In parts of New Mexico, adobe houses are still quite common; they have to be covered with a good hard plaster if they are to survive even one rainy season. This would also protect the plastic of the water bottles from UV rays. As long as the plaster is maintained, there’s no reason such a house couldn’t last generations.
If they have mud why not just make bricks and bake them?
If they leave the bottles exposed I agree. If they put a nice thick layer of mud over the outside? It might hold up.
About baking bricks, the reason for using mud bricks is the lack of fuel to bake them or the cost.
Been done before with beer cans. You can drink your way to a new home.
I’ll help. Just post a picture of yourself with a shoe on your head.
replied to the wrong post.
a mind is a terrible thing to waste
You should have left well enough alone. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable response. 😉
It’s been done with glass beer bottles.
There’s a “state park” in … Pasadena?, CA called the Crystal Palace that’s open to the public one day a year. Very funky and cool place – there’s a junked motorcycle embedded in the exterior wall around the place that was built of all sorts of stuff.
Inside, there’s a small hut made entirely of glass beer bottles held together with cement. My dad’s friend allegedly slept there for several months when he was done and out way back when. I’ve seen it in person. It’s about the size of a small shed.
Somewhere, some guy made an entire (small) island out of lashed together empty 2 liter bottles sufficient to hold up his small home (with duck pond) off the beach somewhere. There’s photos and whatnot if you care to search for them.
My late uncle had 16,000,000 water bottles in Nigeria and I need a trustworthy American to help me get them out.
“My fear is that this building method will increase the demand for sand and even lead to an increase in the price of sand,”
Whaaa? Oh no.
Hate to be the guy drinking all that soda to empty them for sand refilling.
In Pakistan, they build houses with thatch and mud and no binding agent that I noticed.
They can withstand occasional rainstorms, even hard ones.
A long rainy season would probably be different. Does Nigeria have a long rainy season?
As for the UV deterioration, that seems solvable. Just cover the walls with a layer of mud to block out the UV light.
As GregAllen said, Pakis and Afghans build huge houses out of barely dried mud bricks mortared with more mud. They withstand the minor amounts of rainfall and even the winter snows quite well. Pretty good insulation. And, if a chink does present itself, patch it with some mud. Easy. I’ve seen structures that had been standing for decades.
what about wops, wetbacks, or bohunks?
Great until a earthquake rumbles through and then you have nothing, no structure, no walls, no ceiling, nertz.
The north of Pakistan/Afghanistan has cemeteries filled with people who died in houses built like that.
Thank you but I’ll build according to code, not hope, as in hope nothing happens…
Americans are not immune from this syndrome.
Look at their attitudes towards bridge maintenance or health-dont-care.
msbpodcast,
The houses I’m speaking of — thatch and mud would be very unlikely to kill someone, even if they fell. There is a a single (sort-of) heavy central beam, but that is only maybe six inches in diameter. The rest is thatch on the roof, and woven mats covered with mud for the walls.
I’ve seen and evens slept in the homes that Animby refers to. The single story structures wouldn’t worry me too much in an earthquake. I have seen the occasional two-story house and would want to be in one of those.
What kills people in Pakistan are cinder block buildings. They are held together by the littlest bit of mortar. They also tend to skimp on the rebar for the structural parts. A typical one is about three or four stories high.
These building will just spontaneously fall down! They will build them on soft ground and they start to tilt. I lived in one like that for a couple of years until someone pointed out that it was listing about six inches! We never noticed when we move in but, after we did, we moved out.
From my understanding, many of the dead in Pakistan’s big earthquakes where students in sub-par government schools that collapsed.
I didn’t see this myself but I did hear it from aid workers.
As a person that just created a rammed earth wall for my raised garden beds in my greenhouse I can tell you they take alot of water to come apart. Not to mention where this is built most likely gets less rain in one year the most places in the United States gets in a month. The bottles will be fine because when they are done constructing the wall the put a mud/clay plaster over them so sun does not get to the bottles.
Dvorak roofed his house entirely of free AOL floppy disks.
It has a good wow factor, for there. I’m hoping one of the laid off high tech workers in the U.S. has an interest in architecture. That is a field that needs a smart person, badly.
Not bad actually. One should note that here in California, we have adobe buildings that are 2oo years old. They do not wash away in the rain, but they will implode pretty quickly if an earthquake shakes them the right way.
But it should be noted that the only reason that this works in Nigeria is that they have child labor filling the bottles with sand for tuppence a day. To get the bottles filled with US labor at minimum wage would cost way more than regular wood frame housing.
Of course, being bullet proof does have its advantages…
What about unused Ramen noodle packets? What are they good for?
A few…
Packing material; Burglar alarm (place on floor); Crotch enhancer; Camera table-tripod ; Pie crust ; Inexpensive musical instrument;
Clarification:
Flavor packets, not the noodles. I used the noodles for other things and only rarely flavor them with the packets.
—
How do noodles make a musical instrument?
“Stig of the dump” – goes 21st Century (One for the UK readers there)
Not from the UK though still funny. Obviously I’m a Top Gear fan.
Sorry mate. “Stig of the dump” was a children’s book popular in the 1970’s/1980’s in the UK.
It was about a “boy” who lived in a rubbish tip (refuse site) and made his home in a cave there.
One day new kids in the area turn up and befriend him and turn his cave into a home. Complete with windows made from old glass bottles (hence the reference).
In case that doesn’t sound mad enough, near the end of the book the who thing goes psychedelic and the kids end up going back in time to where “Stig” was from… which is prehistoric Britain.
They made a TV program of it in 1981
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l40BBqEK1c
Then they did it again in 2002 and totally gave the game away of who or rather WHAT “Stig” was.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUMNaCERHgc
House of a million sips.
One man’s trash is anothers’ castle. 🙂
If it works run with it.
I can see a sand tax on the horizon.
Why fill the bottles with sand? Leave them empty with caps on, and get better insulation. Less work too.
Air filled bottoms would compress under the load.
Even with air tight caps? The force of the mass directly on top of even the bottom row would be negligible…1-2 pps? The bottom rows might compress a little…
Not enough mass. Gentle breeze would topple the tower.
I have a vague memory that I’ve seen a picture of a structure built with the empty bottles.
I _think_ the house has some framing in it to bear the roof. Then the bottles were stacked in the wall spaces and covered with stucco or mud.
Have any of you seen the houses that Habitat for Humanity build in Mexico?
I haven’t personally seen them but they sound genius.
As it was describe to me, the walls are Styrofoam panels covered with chicken wire. Very light to transport and very easy to cut and shape.
The panels are then wired together at the corners and covered with stucco to give them strength and fire resistance. The framing is pretty minimum — doors, windows, a roof line.
I don’t remember what the roofs are made of but I imagine that corrugated plastic would work well. It’s translucent which is great in places that have no/irregular electricity.
Nor do I remember if there are glass windows but, in a warmer climate, you’d only need screens anyway.
I can’t find a plan for this with Google. If any of you have first-hand knowledge of this building design, I’d be interested.
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).