Bolivian lawyer builds PET bottle houses for people in poverty
The project's creator claims it is possible to build a house in 20 days
A Bolivian lawyer with a passion for handicrafts kept so much "junk" at home that one day her husband said, "you could build a house with all this stuff." The game made Ingrid Vaca Diez, who has been involved in volunteer work since she was a child, come up with an idea: try to create houses from the reuse of materials, more specifically, PET bottles, for people in extreme poverty. It was then that the project emerged Botellas Houses (House of Bottles).
Ingrid researched ways to reuse materials to produce houses. It was then that he discovered a very efficient formula with the following ingredients: glass bottles, cement, lime, sand, glue, sediment, organic waste, rims and glucose. All of this becomes a kind of sustainable cement, which supports the house and fills the bottles. In 2000, it produced its first house, which had 170 m² and had 36 thousand two-liter PET bottles.
The method is simple: the bottles, filled with various residues and sediments, form the walls. After being tied, they are fixed with lime and cement.
With 14 years of experience working on the project (which includes donations for finishing materials for the property and for furniture), Ingrid guarantees that it is possible to build a house in just 20 days, with the help of future residents. In all, she has helped to create 300 houses made from PET bottles.
after the Botellas Houses having worked in Argentina, Mexico, Panama and Uruguay, in addition to Bolivia itself, Ingrid is thinking about building bottle houses in Brazil, where she believes it is easier to raise bottles, due to the fact that the country, according to her, has a culture of recycling more widespread.
Check out the story (in English / Spanish) of the social entrepreneur in the video.
To learn more about the project, visit its Facebook page. Check out more photos:
