Here’s a utilitarian use for your recyclables. In Warnes, 30km from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, former lawyer Ingrid Vaca Díez is helping poor families build affordable housing using the stuff we normally throw away.
Her project, Centro Ecoagroturistico (EcoAgroTouristic Center) was born from the idea of using unwanted material to build eco-friendly houses. With six other like-minded women, she collected four thousand plastic bottles, known as pet, from friends, local schools and bountiful garbage dumps to obtain the materials needed for their work.
The bottles were filled with sand, earth or sawdust to make them hard, then bound to each other using cement, one on top of the other. When that work was completed, another coat of cement, clay or straw was applied to both sides to reinforce the wall.
Eighty-one bottles are needed to create one square meter and at least ten thousand are needed to build one small house with two bedrooms, living/dining area, kitchen and bathroom.
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19-year-old Boyan Slat has unveiled plans to create an Ocean Cleanup Array that could remove 7,250,000 tons of plastic waste from the world’s oceans. The device consists of an anchored network of floating booms and processing platforms that could be dispatched to garbage patches around the world. Instead of moving through the ocean, the array would span the radius of a garbage patch, acting as a giant funnel. The angle of the booms would force plastic in the direction of the platforms, where it would be separated from plankton, filtered and stored for recycling.