Another idea about how to reuse plastic is using it to make bricks to make temporary houses for refugees.
|
Method:
I shredded 10 clean HDPE milk bottles then heated them to 200 degrees Celsius for 5 hours, I added more and more plastic to the brick on 30 minute intervals to ensure consistent melting and to minimise the formation of air pockets and pressed the melted plastic before applying each new layer. Once melted I pressed the brick further applying 5kg weights. A key concern in using milk bottles is the fact that fat from the milk could prevent homogeneous melting (of different types of HDPE from different companies etc), so to combat that in the preparation of the bottles we washed and dried the bottles |
|
Using CAD, we created a model of what we would like them to look like. The CAD model has one floor, a large doorway, 2 windows and 2 rooms. We believe that these temporary houses are more environmentally friendly, sanitary and convenient compared to the settlements that refugees have to live in at the moment. They involve recycling, they are aesthetically pleasing and they can be positioned in ways that conserve space and allow more houses to be in the same area. The temporary houses should house 4-6 people and be 3 metres high, 3 metres wide and 4 metres long. Using these sizes and a half brick size wall, each house will require approximately 4320 bricks. This size means that they will take less time to build, the average house requires 8176 bricks. Therefore, if 2 billion milk bottles were recycled, 167 million bricks can be made which will make around 38,580 houses that can house a minimum of 154,320 refugees in one year.
Even so, there is over 9 million tons of plastic in sea and a lot of these are made of High Density Polyethylene. This is because milk bottles are not the only sources of HDPE- the plastic we use to make our bricks. Other sources include opaque plastics such as detergent bottles, plastic bins and plastic gardening equipment. |