Millions if not billions of plastic water and beverage bottles are discarded every year, with most making their way to landfills, the ocean, or, in poorer countries, disposed of in heaps.

In developing countries, this waste is often just mounded in garbage piles. In more wealthy nations, there are often recycling programs, which find ways to reutilize at least a portion of this waste stream which sounds great, in theory.

“The United States uses 129.6 Million plastic bottles per day which is 47.3 Billion plastic bottles per year. About 80% of those plastic bottles end up in a landfill.”

In recent years, most notably in Africa (Nigeria) and in Central and South America, initiatives have been taken to turn plastic beverage bottles into building materials. In Nigeria alone, where 500 million plastic beverage bottles are discarded each year, there’s plenty of material that can be repurposed for construction.

Firstly, bottles must be collected and sorted. About 14,000 bottles of uniform size are needed to make a two-bedroom bottle-home . In countries like Nigeria, bottles are donated by hotels, restaurants, foreign embassies, and residences. Obviously they are also collected on the garbage piles outside of villages.

The next material needed is sand. The sand is sifted through a sieve to remove leaves and foreign objects, and to provide a relatively uniform grain-size distribution. The plastic bottles filled and tightly packed with the sieved sand.

Once filled, the bottle becomes a “brick” of sorts that can be used as a basis with which to build a solid structure. It is said that once built, a wall made of so called “bottle bricks” is up to 20-times stronger than a wall constructed of concrete cinder blocks .

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