Can you guess what this house is made out of? If you guessed 2 liter soda bottles, you guessed correctly. Is this a magnificent structure or what? Its not even finished and yet I’m so inspired by the possibilities.

These structures can be completely concreted so you would never know it was built from plastic bottles, or you can leave some of the outer bottle exposed and paint it revealing a pretty star pattern. In the photo above you can see the concrete pillars, and all of them are comprised of 1 or 2 liter bottles, depending on their use.

When I first saw a video of how these alternative houses and structures were being built, I said to myself, “HA! There it is, our chicken coops, our master greenhouse, the animal structures, the fermentation house, the casita, and the duck house.

Of course I also imagine that if I can learn to make a coop, cistern and other structures, what’s to stop me from teaching others with substandard housing to build a dream house out of someone’s garbage.

The beauty of filling plastic bottles with dirt from your property is that you can also shove other things in bottle and compact it down. Dirt, plastic baggies, plastic wrap, sticky labels, broken small objects…if it can fit in the hole, it can add to the strength of the bottle. 🙂

So what’s the next step for us? Getting the bottles. We simply don’t have enough bottles to even start a project like this. We can also use glass bottles (which we have in abundance) but the real workhorse will be the 2 liter bottles. We’ll be talking to our neighbors, and for anyone that lives in the Los Lunas or Albuquerque area, if you’d like to give us your bottles, leave a comment and let me know!
Here is a video by the company that came up with the soda bottle design: