An emergency shelter made of recycled plastic bottles

Architectural and design start-up Six Miles Across London Limited (Small) and Shard engineer WSP designed a low cost pyramid-shaped emergency shelter, made of bamboo and plastic bottles.

The pyramid (technically a tetrahedron) consists of bamboo rods, attached to each other using the caps of the bottles. Each side is divided up on four triangles. The bottles are filled with straw as an insulator and for privacy, and are threaded on a bamboo rod like beads. These rods are stacked on the triangular frame. In the front, the middle triangle is left open and provided with a canopy that doubles as a door.

To make the shelter wind and rain proof, bottles are cut into four pieces, and these plastic sheets are attached to the corners and sides.

Ricky Sandhu, founder of Small says, “We believe ‘BottleHouse’ provides a new formula for the world’s growing problem of discarded plastic bottles by transforming them into rapidly deployable, protective and valuable shelters in areas of the world that need them the most and at the same time setting a new mission for the rest of the world to think about and contribute to – a new circular economy.”

Images: Small