Nigeria: Housing made affordable

Plastic bottles are often seen as a waste and end up in dump sites and nothing good can come out of them.

But could you live in a house made of plastic bottles?

Well in northern Nigeria, a local organisation has decided to defy the odds by building house from plastic wastes.

But why did they come up with the project?

“We thought of one way of getting rid of this is to recycle them and on the other side you can see that we have a lot of housing problems, more than half of our masses don’t have adequate housing. So and there is a technology, simple technology of using this plastic waste to construct a house which is by far cheaper and can be affordable more than the shabby mud houses or shanty towns that we are having.”

Living in his bottle house for three years now, Sammail Ismail, does not regret abandoning his old house made of wood that was prone to collapse during the rainy season.

“It is not comparable because for instance if you take one block of bottle brick, when you compare with a block…cement block, it can easily break the block but this one, if you take a hammer you cannot break it.”

The houses are also better suited for the country’s hot climate.
the developmental association for renewable energy,a non governmental organisation, came up with the project to address the housing problem in the country and also to tackle environmental pollution.

A majority of Nigerians live in abject poverty with quite a number housed in slums and shanty towns.

Nevertheless, the association plans to solve this problem with this eco- friendly initiative which will in turn provide jobs for the unemployed youth in the country.