Eco-Tec: Building homes from plastic bottles

Of all the materials that you could possibly use to build a house, plastic bottles are the last thing you would expect to actually work. They do, and surprisingly well. A group called Eco-Tec, based in Honduras, has proven that with some sand, a lot of ingenuity, and a desire to give people affordable housing it's very possible.

You can go to their website here and learn all about their projects and priorities. Their biggest mission: training people how to use waste materials (like bottles) with whatever else is available (like sand or soil) to build effective, practical structures. This goes hand-in-hand with their community recycling/reusing pickups, where they get everyone to contribute even if it's as simple as finding plastic bottles.  Over the past 7 years they've done a number of incredible projects, from aqueducts and water tanks to full fledged houses. You can check out a ton of really cool pictures from their projects, and other incredible plastic bottle works from around the world at Inspiration Green.

According to their website Eco-Tec also specializes in composting and vermiculture. Their main english website is here, upon entering you can watch a video that gives a great overview of what they're about. These things go hand-in-hand with educating people in impoverished areas of the world to build effective structures from materials that would otherwise be inefficiently recycled, sitting in a landfill, or simply littered across the land. Altogether this makes Eco-Tec an incredibly important organization that deserves to thrive.