A Hurricane-Proof House

This house, at first glance, looks like it is made from wood. However, this house is really made from 600,000 recycled plastic bottles. These bottles were shredded, melted, and then made to be a wall six inches thick. The house also has hidden advantages over a typical house.

“This is a way to get rid of plastic waste and at the same time develop structures that are sustainable,” says David Saulnier, cofounder of JD Composites, the startup that built the prototype house. The recycled-plastic panels provide more insulation than typical walls, so homeowners can save energy in heating and cooling.

Using this type of panel to build a house isn’t new, but the company chose to use a fully recycled material to try to tackle the problem of plastic pollution. Each minute, by one estimate, consumers buy at least one million single-use plastic bottles; the majority end up in landfills or in waterways, not at recycling plants. The startup partnered with Armacell, a Belgian company that uses bottles rejected by the recycling industry to build a foam core from 100% recycled plastic. JD Composites trims that material and laminates it to create each panel.

The walls are also not something to be underestimated.

Though the walls are lightweight, they’re engineered to be strong. In testing at a certification facility, an eight-foot chunk of the wall withstood 326-mile-an-hour wind speeds, twice as strong as a Category 5 hurricane. “They basically couldn’t destroy the panel in the test chamber,” Saulnier says. “They had never loaded a panel by hand in the test chamber that they couldn’t break, ever. Ours was the first.”

This house can also be assembled faster than a typical construction home.

Check out more information about this over at Fast Company.

(Image Credit: Fast Company)