Building a Bottle Wall

We have been very inspired of the bottle wall buildings in Siem Reap, made by Ms. Noung and NGO HUSK Cambodia and we wanted to promote the idea also in Kouk Khleang. Here are photos of building a piece of bottle wall to to the downstairs of the youth center.

The wall consists of plastic bottles filled with cleaned, non-organic trash. The bottles can be filled into any kind of frame, most often concrete or wood. If the frame is concrete, one should leave metal ”hooks” for attaching the iron chicken net to hold the bottles is place. If this had been done while casting the concrete in KKYC, the wooden frame, which actually turned out to be quite expensive as wood is so scarce in Cambodia, would not have been needed.

After building the wooden frame and attaching the net from the bottom, one can start filling the frame with bottles. A good amount of bottles is 2 side by side per wall. In order to save cement in plastering one should then fill the gaps between bottles with pieces of plastic. The bottles are simply tied together with iron wire, which makes the best result when added to each layer.

It would have been great to collect all the bottles in Kouk Khleang but as Inari’s time in Cambodia was so short, we needed to buy our bottles from Siem Reap. What made us happy was that local kids picked up the idea and wanted to collect few bottles for the center. Here are some pictures of them proudly receiving their awards of 300 riel per bottle.

Interested in hearing more of building out of bottles? Please contact Noung with her email n_guide@hotmail.com.