En esta noticia
A seven-room house built with 8,000 glass bottles and tiles made from toothpaste tubes seems like an idea that is hard to imagine, but Edna Dantas and her daughter María Gabrielly Dantas made it a reality in Brazil. On Itamaracá Island, in the state of Pernambuco, the two led a project that combines recycled materials, creativity, and a different way of building a home.
The initiative, known as Casa de Sal, arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, when a mother and daughter were looking for an alternative to have their own home and found an opportunity in the waste accumulating in the area to develop their project. With experience linked to recycling and sustainability, they decided to recover bottles, wood, and other discarded materials to incorporate them into the construction.
The result was a home that transforms waste into building materials for walls, roofs, and other spaces in the house.
How the idea of building a house with 8,000 glass bottles was born
Edna Dantas and her daughter María Gabrielly Dantas drove the Casa de Sal project on Itamaracá Island, in the state of Pernambuco, during the pandemic, when they were looking for an alternative to have their own home and found an opportunity in the waste that accumulates on the beaches and other spaces in the area.
The initiative arose from the combination of a personal need and an environmental concern, since both wanted to build a home and, at the same time, make use of materials that usually ended up in the trash. Edna had experience in socio-environmental education and recycling, while Maria Gabrielly were linked to design and sustainable fashion, two paths that influenced the decision to carry out a proposal based on reuse.
From that idea, mother and daughter began gathering discarded materials to incorporate them into the construction and turn them into part of their home, in a process that unfolded in stages and allowed them to develop an initiative that combines the search for their own home with the use of waste.
They built a seven-room house with bottles and toothpaste tubes
Casa de Sal stands out for the incorporation of 8,000 glass bottles into its walls, a method that allows the reuse of discarded containers as part of the structure of the rooms. To move forward with the project, Edna and María Gabrielly also used reclaimed wood and pallets, while the empty toothpaste tubes were used to make tiles for the roof.
The construction was carried out in stages, as they obtained the materials and solved the various needs of the house, with reuse as the central criterion for making use of available resources on the island. In this way, objects that are normally thrown away found a new function within the house, from the glass containers incorporated into the walls to the materials used in other parts of the structure.
How they placed the glass bottles in the walls to take advantage of natural light
Unlike other constructions that use containers as decorative elements, Edna and her daughter incorporated the glass bottles directly into the walls of their home. To do so, they chose to place them vertically, a technique that allows natural light to pass through the glass and illuminate the interior spaces, according to Edna in an interview with the Brazilian outlet Metrópoles.
Before incorporating them into the project, mother and daughter collected and cleaned the bottles they found on beaches, in mangroves, and on abandoned land to give them a new use within the home.
Likewise, during construction, they faced unfavorable conditions where in the first stage of the project, they lived without a conventional bathroom and had to handle some everyday tasks with limited resources while the home was taking shape. In this sense, they faced prejudice for building on their own in a field traditionally dominated by men, but despite the difficulties, they continued with the project until they turned the recycled materials into their home.