Today’s business profile has a decidedly international flavor.
First, however, I feel compelled to disclose something. I really dislike plastic bottles, especially when they are used to sell water to people who have an ample source of safe tap water (Americans).
According to Time Magazine, the U.S. produced 28 million tons of plastic waste in 2005, and 27 million tons of it ended up in landfills where experts with the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection estimate it will take as long as a million years to decay. Here are the estimated degradation times for common containers:
- Tin can 80-100 years
- Aluminum can 200-500 years
- Plastic bottle 1 million years
- Styrofoam cup never
- Glass bottle never
Now the good news. Ten years ago, a German engineer named Andreas Froese (pictured) sought a way to shelter millions of homeless people in Third World countries. Using little more than what was at hand – dirt and trash, plastic bottle houses were born.
When he arrived in Honduras, Froese immediately noticed mounds of refuse that were punctuated by hundreds of thousands of PET bottles. Without much fanfare, he set about experimenting with the bottles to see if they could be used to build houses for the huddled masses. He soon found that just about anyone is capable of filling a plastic bottle with dirt, and that dirt-filled bottles represent a pretty decent building material. It took some experimentation to figure out how to build walls and roofs with cylindrical building blocks, but once a system of strings to tie the bottlenecks together was sorted out, structures went up quickly with mud mortar.
The resulting buildings are sturdy, well-insulated, and resistant to bullets and earthquakes.
Eventually Froese launched Eco Tec, and the company has now built more than 50 bottle buildings around the world.
By reusing trash while helping local people build housing for themselves, Froese has created a first-order sustainable company.