Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Healthy Housing Ideas From Unhealthy Habits

NEW YORK (digitalwarriormedia): A group of professionals collected 25,000 bottles & donations to complete a project to build housing with recycled material.

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Bolivians are taking the cause of the livable earth upon themselves in helping the environment & families in need by building homes made of recycled bottles. The first of the 'Casa de Botellas' was finished recently in an poorer neighborhood of Warnes - a town in the eastern province of Santa Cruz where housing needs have seemingly little or no representation in the provincial government.

A group of young professionals spent months collecting over 25,000 bottles & raised private donations to complete the project. Local neighborhood volunteers filled the thousands of bottles with sand. The bottles were then connected together & reinforced with cement & re bar - creating walls that seem far sturdier than those of the wooden shanties that dominate the landscape.

Due to centuries of economic exploitation, many parts of Bolivia lack even base waste disposal and recycling systems. New innovations in the government's approach to economic development in Bolivia would seem to encourage building homes from recycled materials while keeping non-biodegradable products from ending up in rivers or strewn across fields.

With numerous other residents of Warnes needing desperately to replace the substandard units they live in, some have proposed to make several more 'Casa de Botellas' units & turn the area into a tourist attraction that educates people on local and global environmental issues while sustaining the local economy.

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