Siem Reap Plastic bottle house

In Siem Reap the NGO Husk has done a very interesting project with building a Health Center out of recycle plastic bottles. From outside one can't tell what the house is made of except from the "tree" which they left visible for educational purposes. 


Outside the main tourist parts of Siem Reap rubbish collection is simply not available. Where it is, often families cant afford to use it.  Compounding the problem is the lack of awareness or education on enviornmental issues. Rubbish is often either left dumped around villages or in most cases burnt.  Both of these practices create worsen the environmental issues further.

The Eco Block takes the place of bricks.  Made from old drink bottles of any size stuffed tightly with clean landfill rubbish.  These are the ideal eco alternative to bricks and greatly reduce waste going to landfill. Anything from noodle wrappers, broken up polystyrene trays, straws, bags, plastic wrappers, chip packets, etc will do

Guidelines

• No food, green waste or wet rubbish can be put inside the eco block
• Eco Blocks need to be stuffed tightly. A stick, piece of bamboo or long chopstick does the trick!
• Any size plasic bottle is great, it just needs its lid

 Bottles in the wall stuffed with recycled plastic.






















House from the inside.

The weekly rewarding site on hotel Sojourn's parking lot.

The idea with the bottles is to replace the normal unbearing red bricks as a material for insulation and filling of the wall frames made of concrete, wood or steel.

Only bottles with clean and dry plastic trash are accepted to be used as building material and the ones containing paper, organic materials or cloth are rejected.





















The reward schema for the bottles.

Rice and oil as rewards for collecting the bottles.






















Noung making sure everybody gets their fare share.






















The ladies waiting for their rewards.

 




















And of course it is always better to get rid of plastic in total, but as the developing cities in the world are full of plastic wasre already, it would be great to come up with clever solutions to reduce the environmental impacts of plastic packaging.

Thanks for Noung, HUSK and Helena Sandman for introducing the project to us!