Bottle Building

Following on from my post about Taiwan’s unique recyclingsystem, I’m popping back there (not literally unfortunately) to gush about another clever Taiwanese project: the first fully functional recycled building.

Joint with its obsession for fast food comes Taiwan’s capability to drink its way through 4.6 billion plastic water bottles each year. Even with its daily musical rubbish trucks bundling away the recycling, only 4% of plastic bottles get recycled in Taiwan leaving behind enormous amounts in rubbish bins and floating about in the ocean. The Far Eastern Group, inspired by their designers love of bottled tea, picked this ecologically frowned upon material for their upcycling project of rather large proportions. The ecoARKPavillion in Taipei.

Made from 1.5 million recycled PET bottles (taken straight from the Taiwanese Waste Stream), this 130m by 40m, nine story construction takes a lot of plastic out of the dump, recycling it into a beautiful, transparent and eco-friendly building. The plastic bottles are moulded into honeycomb, geometric Polli-Bricks that slot together with no gaps. The solid structure is strong enough to withhold typhoons and earthquakes – perfect for our recent, unreliable weather conditions.

The bottles can be filled with air to deflect heat keeping the buildings cool or packed with sand or water to absorb sunlight and warm the inside. The outside is coated in a fireproof laminate to prevent fire hazards, with the inside sporting the normal smoke detectors and sprinkler systems found in normal brick and concrete buildings. Lit by sunlight during the day and energy saving LED lights at night, this building is very low in new carbon. It even houses a falling screen of rain-water to act as air conditioning.

We all see rubbish being kicked about the streets and plastic bottles can be found blown into every corner and caught up in any bush all over the country. Stubbornly strong, they withstand a lot of scuffing, rolling and bashing showing only a few scratches as evidence. If we know that PET bottles don’t decompose then let’s use this to our advantage and make stuff with them!