House made of 600,000 recycled bottles withstands winds of over 300 MPH and is better insulated than a normal house.
A startup company has come up with a brilliant use for plastic bottles — which are being produced faster than we can recycle them — melt them down and make them into “unbreakable” walls for houses.
In addition to being able to withstand winds of 325 MPH, the walls are also super insulating, reducing heating and cooling costs, Fast Company reports.
The prototype is a 2000-square-foot home in Nova Scotia, Canada, made from 600,000 plastic bottles, shredded, melted and injected with a gas that turns them into foam.
The foam is then used to fill in the 6-inch walls, made with recycled aluminum siding, laser-printed to look like cedar.
“This is a way to get rid of plastic waste and at the same time develop structures that are sustainable,” says David Saulnier, cofounder of the JD Composites.
The foam core of the walls is made from 100% recycled plastic water and soda bottles rejected by the recycling industry, which otherwise would’ve ended up in landfills and oceans.
Though the walls are lightweight, they’re virtually unbreakable their makers say.
In a testing facility, they withstood the maximum 326-mile-an-hour wind speeds, twice as strong as a Category 5 hurricane.
“They basically couldn’t destroy the panel in the test chamber,” Saulnier says. “They had never lost a panel by hand in the test chamber that they couldn’t break, ever. Ours was the first.”
The plastic bottle homes are also much faster to construct than normal homes. Bonded with chemicals rather than nails, the house’s 170 wall panels were put together in 7 hours, with the roof installed the next day.
The cost for building the prototype was comparable to that of a conventional home.