Today you are worrying about garbage sorting, and tomorrow you may live in a house made of "garbage".
Now, someone has built a 2,000-square-foot house in Nova Scotia, Canada, out of more than 600,000 plastic bottles.
At first glance, it looks like an ordinary house. The inside also seems to be no different from any other house: a living room, three bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom...
But in reality, beneath the outer layer of recycled aluminum siding, are hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles shredded, melted, and cooled, a recyclable material known as PET foam.
This green building material, like shaving cream, expands when squeezed out and becomes a durable hard wall once it cools.
▲ Custom panels that make up the walls and roof of the home.
The prototype house was built by start-up JD Composites, who worked with Armacell, a Belgian company that makes the foam, to press the material from these plastic bottles into 15cm-thick walls, a week ago a flatbed trailer brought about 170 panels to the At the construction site, it took 7 hours to complete and stabilize the wall.
The next day, they built the roof from the same materials, and completed the rest of the house just as quickly.
You may think, a house made of plastic will collapse when the wind blows?
Its walls are really light, but it's also designed to be strong. Compared with traditional houses, it does not require the assistance of insulating siding, nails and other materials, and the panels are directly chemically bonded together, which helps to make the whole structure more integrated and stable.
In early tests of the building material, an 8-foot-long wall withstood 326 mph winds, twice the speed of a Category 5 hurricane. So JD Composites co-founder David Saulnier believes it's also a housing solution for hurricane-prone areas and disaster relief.
In addition, because of the material properties, it can also help maintain indoor temperature, and it has anti-corrosion, anti-mildew, anti-termite functions.
And the cost of the house is no different from the cost of an ordinary residential building. JD Composites, while not mentioning an explicit fee, said it ended up costing less than $400,000, including all the furniture.
For now, they plan to sell their homes or rent them out on Airbnb, hoping to expand in the future to make better use of the huge amount of plastic being thrown around.
▲ The founder of JD Composites sits in the "plastic room". Pieces of plastic on a tabletop show the first stage of the recycling process. Image via: Brett Ruskin/CBC
According to the Guardian data, consumers in the world now buy at least 1 million plastic bottles every minute, and the annual consumption of plastic bottles will reach 5 trillion by 2021, but most plastic bottles do not end up in recycling factories, but landfill , burning, spilling into land and sea.
We also need more new ways to create a circular economy for plastic bottles.
After all, this "plastic binge" is as dangerous as looming climate change.
