Plastic houses!

@ninalanyon Better than them going to landfill or ending up in the ocean.

@Hopelandia Of course but what would be even better would be not having the bottles in the first place.

And how long does the structure last? What happens to the plastic when the structure is demolished? If there were a good recycling solution in place then the supply of genuinely scrap bottles would decline. If this style of building becomes widespread then it increases the demand for plastic bottles and hinders the development of recycling arrangements.

@ninalanyon 100%. But for now, this ain't a bad use of them.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. I don't think a whole industry is going to spring up around this.

@ninalanyon @Hopelandia

Quite so.

Further, how long will the plastic last in the tropical sun? Not necessarily by the heat although the sand will absorb a coniderable amount.

I don't know how well these bottles can stand up to the IR radiation (heat). The material is not designed to withstand UV radiation for long, especially at near-Equatorial latitudes. It can become brittle in months even at 50º N (the approximate latitude of Southern England).

It's an interesting experiment but I have considerable doubts about the viability of such construction.

....

The scrap bottles should not end up in the sea or buried anyway - they should be collected to salvage the plastic (not "recylce" the bottles) to produce new types of plastic products. Such re-manufactured plastics seem all mixed together anyway, which is not surprising given the range of types of thermoplastics.

"Plastic" seems to have become popularly but ignorantly treated as one material and at best a necessary evil - but it ending up as a pollutant or litter, or wasted in land-fill, is the fault of those who use and dispose of it, not the plastics and their uses per se, apart from as microscopic beads in cleaning products as those escape via the sewers.

I have machined some pieces of the re-manufactured thermoplastic moulded into bars for making roofing-battens, garden furniture and the like. It is peculiar stuff, soft with a fairly low melting-point, holding a lot of both bubbles and occasionally shiny particles possibly from aluminium-foil wrappings. Some plastics are also re-manufactured into new shopping bags and similar items. I do not know how far repeat "recycling" can go.

The thermosetting plastics such as the synthetic resins used for glass-, fabric-, paper- and carbon- fibre engineering materials, cannot be re-formed into new versions anyway.

@ninalanyon most plastic bottles AREN'T recycled. Most end up in landfill or the sea.
Of the roughly %5 - (if youre lucky) -30% that do, they end up as carpets and other polyethyline type products.
(Which takes away from the sale of natural versions).

Plastic bottles last hundreds if not thousands of years. Even in the sun.

This is also in an arid third world country. Sun baked bricks can also last centuries.
The same type of daub is used and is something that has to be maintained, but not at a high rate like we do our wardrobes full of clothes or lawns.

These places have little resouces.
They often scrounge from city dumps and roadsides.
These houses are literally made from 'found objects'.

Its not going to be 'scaled up' .its a way for the poor and poverty stricken to build a house for practically free.

Instead of dumping on an ingenious project of hope that will house the homelss.... maybe look it up, read and understand the immmense amount of pros this has.
Rather than looking at it from a privileged consumer point of view -look at it from a poor, homelss poverty stricken community point of view.

First world countries POUR out plastic rubbish that often ends up on beaches of these counties and THEY have to clean it up.
We send ships of our refuse to their country to dump.
Millions and millions of tons of it.

Im other third world areas the poor are being industrious and making stuff from what we throw away.

People are employed, (although poorly paid) to collect OUR rubbish, thousands of miles from where we used it - and were too lazy to recycle it.

Read. Learn.

Your arguments are ridiculous and ignorant.

@Hopelandia i never said plastic bottle production should be scaled up either. - the use of making useful stuff like homes from recycling the mountains of rubbish we already have, should be.

Did you even read it?
Do you know what happened to that project?

Im agreeing with you that this is a brilliant idea and that Ninas arguments were ridiculous.


Geez


Forgeddit🙄

@OogieBoogie OMG MY BAD!

I didn't see that you had directed your comment to @ninalanyon. I'm SOOO SORRY😞I'm deleting my comment now.

@Hopelandia ok, thanks.
Its cool.

Ive done the same thing and read shit wrong before.

Thanks🤗