Brief Guide To Building A House With Plastic Bottles

by Paul Ciocoiu · May 25, 2016

This is probably the last thing you have in mind when it comes to recycling plastic bottles. You can use them in many ways in order to find them a new role in and around our homes, but using them as bricks in building a house is probably hard to consider, let alone do it. But here are some steps listed by the American DIY specialized website Instructables.com showing how to build such a house using plastic bottles. So here is a brief guide to building a house with plastic bottles.

The following picture is of an ecological house constructed in Honduras using some 8,000 PET bottles, in the process freeing up an estimated 12 cubic meters (m3) in the local landfill.

The house also features a living roof (sometimes called a green roof) of sod and turf. Such roofs not only have aesthetic appeal, but tend to insulate the house better than conventional roofs, lowering heating and cooling costs. They are also cheaper than conventional roofs. When wet, the 102 square meter (m2), living roof of the green house weigh as much as 30 metric tons. The PET bottle walls can support the weight.

Building a house with plastic bottles – 300 years life time

The first step is to take the collected plastic bottles, fill them with sand, sealed and then paste them with a mixture made of earth, clay, sawdust and a little cement to provide additional strength and durability. Next step is building the pillars of the house, no less than 3. Dig a cylindrical pit about 60cm in depth. The radius should be at least 10cm more than the length of the bottle that you are going to use for constructing the pillar.

Make a cement bed (about 4cm thickness) in the pit. Insert a long iron/steel rod at the Centre. Tie a long and strong thread to the rod. Now we are going to lay 10 or 11 bottles around this rod. For this, first lay a bottle on the bed such that the bottle is radially oriented towards the center (the cap is oriented towards the rod). After you have made the foundation for all your pillars, let it dry for a while and then you can start building the pillar.

Building a house with plastic bottles – the foundation of the pillars

Start building a platform which will outline the perimeter of the house. Make a clay bed about 5cm height and 5cm width, less than the length of the bottles. Now lay the bottles (with their neck facing outwards) one by one on this bed and tie them to each other as shown in the picture. After laying a course, fill the inside area with cement, clay or rubble. If you want to make more courses, make sure that you knot each bottle of the underlying course with the above course as shown in the picture. This is to impart more strength to the structure to later support any type of roof.