PET Bottles? Build homes with them!

The plastic carbonated beverage bottles are recyclable but you tend to see them littering your neighbourhood, parks, beaches and public places. The fact is, it is not even economically viable to recycle them if the recycling centre is located at the other side of the town.

PET bottles recycling centres pay by weight and as they are extremely light, thousands of these have to be collected before a commercial return can be achieved. Think about the raising cost of petrol and how many of these bottles can be loaded in a truck if you do not have the means to bale them and you will understand why they are not one of the popular picks for recyclers as a business.

But this is going to change if physics professor Newton Lima's ecological brick invention catch on. No baling machine will be required as he used the bottle whole. First he sealed the bottle with air before inserting it into the centre of a much larger rectangular wooden mold. The mold is then filled with quartz sand and cement and once hardened, the "PET brick" is removed and ready for use.

The benefit of building homes with his "PET bricks" in our climate is that they will keep our homes cooler as the air pumped into the bottles is effective as insulator. Other than a cooler and cleaner environment, ecological bricks can also be our solution to providing low-cost housing for low-income families in the country.

Now that I have your interest, you may want to explore other abandoned materials you can use to create your own ecological bricks, such as, used food (primarily candy) wrappers, peanut shells and wood shavings.