How Yahaya Ahmed’s house, first of its kind in Africa, has turned to a tourist attraction for foreigners, put Yelwa, a small Kaduna village, on the global map, and encouraged recycling of waste materials for a safer environment
What do you do with plastic bottles after you have emptied their content? A Nigerian has built a house in Kaduna using 14,800 sand-filled plastic bottles as bricks.
Yahaya Ahmed, an engineer and the director of a non-governmental organisation, Developmental Association of Renewable Energies in Nigeria (DARE), said the house was built by his organisation to encourage recycling of waste materials, create jobs and ensure a safer environment in Nigeria.
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Mr Ahmed said workers filled the plastic bottles with sand and linked them at the neck by an intricate network of strings to build the house, which he said is the first of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa.
“It’s the cheapest house that everyone can construct without spending much money because the building materials are available on the streets and trash dump centres,” he told journalists at the site located at unguwar -Yalwa on the Kaduna Zaria road.
The house has three rooms, a toilet and a kitchen.
He said it is “20 times stronger than brick walls houses and can last for over 300 years if constructed properly and carefully. It is fireproof, bulletproof, earthquake-resistant and can adapt to all kinds of climate changes, desertification and deforestation.
“It is the cheapest house to build in this generation with waste plastic bottles on the streets polluting our environment and causing more problems like flood and other disasters in the communities.”
Explaining the shape of the house, Mr Ahmed said bottle houses are often more convenient to build in a circular fashion. “The circular shape adds strength to the walls, while providing a very artistic and pleasing appearance.
“Any person with masonry skills can be used as labour in the construction of one of these homes. We have trained many youth and we are still training more youth and adults the various ways of constructing these houses across the country and some parts of Africa.”
