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Instead of ‘drink and dump,’ the Santa Cruz family from Puerto Iguazu, Misiones, Argentina created the La Casa de Botellas — a whimsical eco-friendly house, built reusing a slew of plastic and more than an equal amount of ingenuity.

‘Sustainability’ is the word on the tip of every tongue and the uppermost on most ecologically conscious minds and with good reason. The problem of waste management and disposal is a Leviathan that most cities are struggling to combat. In fact, most of our urban waste is recyclable but in light of the lack of necessary infrastructure or other viable alternatives, trash is burned, leading to a chain reaction of problems — large amounts of CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming, climate fluctuations and the eventual deterioration of the planet.

The Ecological Bottle House, illustrates how a bit of creative resourcefulness can alter the way we inhabit our fragile environment. It is surprising to think that Mr. Santa Cruz came up with the idea while making his daughter’s playhouse, a surprisingly robust assemblage of bottles. He went on to test the idea further by building a full-sized bedroom cottage with an actual bed, three chairs, shelves full of toy cars, a broom, an octopus mobile and even a fake hanging plant, all out of plastic bottles, some wood framing and few nuts and bolts to bring it all together.

Although no family member is a trained architect or designer, this has not prevented him or her from successfully designing a house that is sustainable, simple and yet creative, down to the last detail. The walls of the house were made by stacking two-litre bottles, some cut in half to slip over other bottles, screwed into the adjacent bottles. In order to avoid too much empty space and make all bottles interlock, all the joints were placed broad-end to broad-end—no necks. These bottle stacks were arranged within a wooden frame to form panels, which were twist-tied together with wire to assemble a house. Doors and windows were made with CD cases in an assortment of colours. The family chose not to fill the bottles and the gaps in between with concrete and given northern Argentina's mild climate, the walls of bare bottles were a nice touch since their translucence admits plenty of natural light and the small gaps between bottles encourage natural ventilation.

The roof design is especially cool, made of tetra-pack boxes, flattened into shingles and laid aluminium-side up for high solar reflectance. The re-use of the tetra-pack is an especially commendable feature, because tetra-packs are rarely recycled as it is not cost-effective, even in most of the developed world. The tetra-pack roof, unfortunately, lasts only four to five years before succumbing to rain. Mr. Santa Cruz ingeniously covered them with a layer of plastic bottles cut to resemble terra cotta roof tiles, which he believes would last for at least two decades.

Plastic bottles have been used in novel ways throughout the house. The platform for the cottage stood on bottles filled with earth and stacked horizontally rather than on end; even the stairs are made by stacking earth-filled bottles to different heights. The Santa Cruz family turned bottles into furniture as well. The chairs and bed were constructed the same way the walls were, but with the stacked bottles placed parallel rather than serial to achieve structural strength across a wide area.

The family continues to explore new ideas that would add to the sustainable- design value of their house. They have come up with a way to make the structure sturdier, by filling out the fronts and backs of panels with concrete. Laying the panel flat and pouring concrete on it, around the bottles is a cheap way to make concrete walls without forms and using a fraction as much concrete as slab construction. The air in the bottles also makes the concrete wall insulating. For the non-concrete walls, Mr. Santa Cruz has come up with the idea of filling the bottles partly with earth, for a makeshift kind of fireproofing—a fire will first shrivel a bottle, then melt it enough that it splits and the earth spills out, smothering the fire.

These ideas make the house a truly sustainable venture. Its sustainability also stems from the fact that the assembly is modular (and hence easy to adapt to different scales), easy to transport and cost-effective. The Ecologic House of Bottles is a pioneer — a means to communicate that the balance of man and nature is tricky but nonetheless very much attainable.

Text: Namrata C Rao
Photographs: courtesy Alfredo Alberto Santa Cruz and his family

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