Eco-Friendly House Construction using PET Bottles

Today the construction industry is in need of finding cost effective material for increasing the strength of structure. In India, most of the construction is done using bricks and they are one of the major ingredients in building material used for construction. In the process of brick making, bricks are burnt in kiln which introduces the emission of CO2 gas in major quantity which pollutes the environment. Also studies find that as many as 65 million empty plastic water bottles per year end up as garbage in landfill sites. To overcome all the environmental problems of bricks, they are replaced by waste bottles. This project deals with the possibility of using waste PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate) bottles as a partial replacement over bricks. The main objective of this project was to work on the strength of bottle bricks. Therefore compressive tests were performed on bottle bricks with different composition of sand and soil. The compression test was prepared for 250ml, 600ml and 1000ml sizes of bottle-bricks filled with either fine or coarse soil. Various cubes are casted using bottle bricks with different compositions and tests are performed on them. As a result, all the bottles are achieving greater strength over the permissible limit required for burnt clay bricks. From these results it can be concluded that plastic bottle construction have a potential as a wall construction material and can be efficiently used for economic house construction.