According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 2012, Americans recycled about 34.5 percent of their trash, creating 87 million tons of re-usable materials.
That got us thinking: what if we used our trash to build new homes and buildings instead of just sending it off for refinement in recycling centers? So we took a closer look at some dwellings made of recycled materials to consider the possibilities…
South Korean Artist Choi Jeong-Hwa used 1000 doors on scaffolding to turn a ten-story building in downtown Seoul, Korea into a public work of art.Responding to the shortage of schools in the Phillipines, Pepsi and the My Shelter foundation built out of 9,000 plastic bottles in San Pablo. They filled each 1.5 and 2-liter bottle with an adobe mixture made out of clay, manure, sand, and water.For Engineering and Humanity Week (April 2011) students at the Southern Methodist University of Dallas, Texas built a house using “Ubuntu-blox” made of 20 to 30 plastic shopping bags and three cubic feet of foam plastics. It cost $250 to build.Serbian math professor Tomislav Radovanovic had his students collect 13,500 plastic bottles for his newly constructed home. It has a concrete foundation with the windows and kitchen furniture built entirely out of plastic bottles as well. It took five years to build, and you can see a video of its inside here — the interior is surprisingly beautiful.This two-bedroom house in Nigeria was made out of 14,000 plastic bottles filled with sand and then mortared together with mud and cement. Once completed, the house was reportedly bulletproof, fireproof and earthquake-resistant with a comfortable year-round temperature of 64 degrees Fahrenheit.A small shop in Nanjing, China constructed out of 100,000 Pepsi cans. It’d be funny if they only sold Coca-Cola products.
