Director of Developmental Association of Renewable Energies in Nigeria, builds house with plastic bottles [photos]

A Nigerian has built a house in Kaduna using 14,800 sand-filled plastic bottles as bricks.

Yahaya Ahmed, an engineer and the director of a non-governmental organisation, Developmental Association of Renewable Energies in Nigeria (DARE), said the house was built by his organisation to encourage recycling of waste materials, create jobs and ensure a safer environment in Nigeria.

Mr Ahmed said workers filled the plastic bottles with sand and linked them at the neck by an intricate network of strings to build the house, which he said is the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa.

“It’s the cheapest house that everyone can construct without spending much money because the building materials are available on the streets and trash dump centres,” he told journalists at the site located at unguwar -Yalwa on the Kaduna Zaria road.

The house has three rooms, a toilet and a kitchen.

He said it is “20 times stronger than brick walls houses and can last for over 300 years if constructed properly and carefully. It is fireproof, bulletproof, earthquake-resistant and can adapt to all kinds of climate changes, desertification and deforestation.

“It is the cheapest house to build in this generation with waste plastic bottles on the streets polluting our environment and causing more problems like flood and other disasters in the communities.”