Building with bottles to demolish pollution trend

Isaac Macharia is the founder of Marafiki Community International, an organisation that deals with sustainable projects in Kenya and focusing on Narok County.

Plastic bottles end up everywhere: in oceans, seas, and open landfills—places they shouldn’t be in the first place.

The world gets through 500 billion plastic bottles a year. Bottles account for 10 percent of global plastic production.

Isaac Macharia, alias Izzo, while working as a tour guide, found himself confronted by this menace. He shares his story.

“I was driving tourists to Maasai Mara National Reserve around 2014 and I saw a pride of lions playing with plastic bottles. It concerned me that the bottles had found themselves deep into the reserve,” he said. 

Having been involved in charitable activities before that included community work, I rallied other tour guides to drop off their bottles after their game drives at our leased property right next to the national reserve entrance to make sure that there were no bottles irresponsibly disposed of while the vehicles got washed. We were only collecting plastic bottles. I said, ‘Just collect plastic bottles and nothing else.’ 

We were able to collect thousands of them and I was at a loss on what to do with them. I just knew that I didn’t want them anywhere close to the park.

Waste management is a huge problem around this touristy area and extends to other parts of the county. Every morning, as the pile increased, I wondered what I would do with them.

My first option was to engage my friends in the construction industry and request that they dispose of the trash to recycling companies. However, I couldn’t afford the logistics expenses that came with that. I decided to research more about it. I am an engineer by profession and so my research leaned towards this.

Then, a light-bulb moment came: what if we could use them for building? Again, I recruited some young people into filling them with sand in readiness for putting up our first cabin.

We have leased property right next to the reserve in Oloolaimutia village which will be the central point for our sustainable projects. The land is owned by the local community.

Some of my peers in the construction industry called me ‘crazy’. They said, ‘Surely, how can you even think of putting up a structure using plastic bottles?’ 

I put up our first eco cabin by bringing the bottles together using a seamless steel wire mesh and using concrete to roof. For months, I was the only person using the cabin because this was an experiment. 

I didn’t want anyone in until I was satisfied with my project. I realised that there was no cracking, and the one cabin has since birthed six other eco cabins, built adjacent to the game reserve. The portion of land that we have leased has a capacity of at least 80 cabins.

Three layers

For collections, and filling with sand, I contract the services of local women in the community.

The first building we did, we used two layers, that is, plastic bottles- side-to-side. For the other cabins, we have employed a three-layer concept whereby we put up plastic bottles on the sides and glass bottles and any other non-biodegradable items, such as clothes, old shoes, broken laptops, sunglasses, broken tiles...anything else you can think of.

With the plastic wrappings, we squeeze them into the glasses or in the plastic bottles and use them as part of our building.

Our cabins are eco buildings made from trash. One building takes up about 5,300 plastic bottles. We experimented by building one cabin using 500ml bottles only. The cabins are ensuite and take up a maximum of three beds and the dimensions of the whole cabin are 16 ft by 24 ft and a corridor of 16 ft by 4 ft.

We were also able to hide in between about 2,500 glass bottles. Along the journey, we also crushed beer cans and were able to hide at least 1,000 of them. Going forward, I know that we can crush even more because crushing the cans is quite an easy task.

When people come here, they are much interested in the design and say they want to build such houses because they are cheap to put up. That’s far from the truth. They are quite expensive to put up and I have had to dig deep into my pockets, sometimes even getting loans to put them up.

The concept of building a three-layered wall to hide trash increases the use of cement, sand, water and manpower. It is also good to note that building using plastic bottles is a ‘slidy’ business, which means we are only able to go to a maximum of four layers each day. 

The cabins are a clean-up exercise and a sustainability aspect of one of the many activities that we do as an organisation. The proceeds we make from the cabins, once they get occupancy, we re-inject into the new buildings so that we can continue with the projects.

We are currently on our 7th cabin, but the project has stalled because of financial constraints. We have a space where we collect the bottles and so far, we have about 145,000 pieces noting that we have not been able to do any further collections in the past five months. 

Our aim is to continue building more cabins, get rid of more trash as we give a voice of reasoning on how to get rid of the problem once and for all. As we continue to engage in the projects, our ideas continue to broaden.”

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