Bottled water is among the first relief supplies that agencies send out into disaster situations. But what if these bottles are also useful to make an emergency shelter?
When a disaster like a hurricane or a typhoon strikes, bottled water is always there, sent by relief agencies.
Today, a team of architects wants to use the empty bottles and the pallets they’re brought on to make upcycled disaster housing.
Disaster Housing Made of Upcycled Bottles
Using a custom plastic pallet as the base, Home20 makes the roof by crushing the bottles that screw into bottle-sized holes. Every bottle is layered on top of the last one, just like Spanish tiles, until the roof is entirely covered and made waterproof.
For the designers of this upcycled housing, the hope is that these pallets will become the standard. They want to invent an alternative shipping pallet for the beverage industry too.
According to Jason Van Nest, an assistant professor at New York Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture and Design who’s head of the project along with fellow professor Farzana Gandhi, they hope to get their project into regular circulation and then eventually turn it into housing.
A regular wooden pallet lasts for around eight trips whereas the plastic ones last around 60. The team hopes that the beverage companies will find the new plastic pallets more affordable and eventually, donate them.
If a disaster strikes, a warehouse manager would only choose one of their pallets with which they could deliver the water bottles and consider that as a tax write-off. As someone begins building the roof, it can be easily attached to any structure.
The Team Hopes to Bring Out their Design in the Real World Soon
Van Nest emphasizes that disasters happen worldwide and local craftsmen have their own building traditions. They’re doing their best to create a relief system that will deliver the necessary water and include the locals’ knowledge and expertise.
What’s more, this pallet can be broken apart and attached to bamboo, earth, or lumber structures made from disaster materials like 2x4s. And, to do this, you needn’t have any screws, nails, or other tools.
When it’s time to move out of the temporary house, the old roof can be recycled, explains Van Nest. To do this, you unscrew the bottles and threw them away. The pallet parts are also recyclable, following the lead of providers of plastic pallets like iGPS.
The team has developed a patent for the pallet design and they’re going to work next on building a proof-of-concept shelter. They’re raising funds through Kickstarter and hence, build more prototypes to show how the system would function with various housing types.
Soon, they hope to be able to bring out the design into the real world. They firmly believe that this design doesn’t provide disaster victims with just a shelter, but also a small sense of control in all that chaos.
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