Behaviour of sand-filled plastic bottled clay panels for sustainable homes

Adequate shelter is a basic necessity for human existence and mankind has continuously improved the quality of shelter. It is estimated that about 1.6 billion people still lack adequate housing. There is a cogent need for developing new methods of delivering housing that can be accessible to low-income communities who have little or no access to finances. Plastic bottles have been suggested as a candidate material for constructing low-cost, environmentally friendly homes in developing countries. Although some research on the use of plastic bottles for housing was found, the existing literature shows considerable discrepancies in the strength of plastic bottles and bottled cubes. Furthermore, the literature is limited to cement cubes and no research has been carried out using locally sustainable materials such as soils. As part of the ‘Bottle House’ project for developing low-cost sustainable homes in Nigeria, this paper seeks to fill this gap by reporting the results of two series of experimental work carried out at the University of Plymouth. A total of eight-four 500 ml PET bottles and twelve wall and floor panels with and without sand-filled plastic bottles were prepared and tested to investigate their strength and failure behaviour. The test results have shown that in-filled sands made a significant contribution to the strength of the bottles and the bottles tested vertically resisted better than those tested horizontally. They have also shown that the panels with sand-filled bottles have about a quarter of the strength of the daub only panels due to a lack of cohesion between bottles and daub, but they are found to be more ductile than the latter.