It’s the ultimate recycling project: building a house out of discarded plastic bottles. It hasn’t caught on in the U.S. yet, but aid organizations in Africa and Asia are busy erecting plastic-bottle homes and other structures to house people in need. The bottles are simply filled with sand, then laid down like bricks, mortared together with mud or cement. Homes crafted from bottles are bullet-proof, fire-proof and resistant to the elements.
It takes about 14,000 bottles to construct a two-bedroom, 1,200-sq.-ft. home. Just think how many houses could be built with the 47.3 billion plastic bottles that end up in American landfills each year. (More than 3 million.) That’s a lot of cheap housing and a boon for the environment too.
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