Every minute 1 million plastic bottles are bought or sold all over the world. That’s about 20,000 every second. Once the bottles are empty, they become worthless waste. Some may get recycled, most get dumped into landfill or our oceans and now there’s literally tonnes of plastic washing up on our beaches – all around the world – contaminating our natural habitats and endangering the worlds wildlife.

small. | Six Miles Across London Ltd. with support from WSP Design Studio are taking action to translate this problem into a social enterprise through cutting edge but low tech design and innovation which can transform this waste into something of tangible value that can be used for providing shelter, healing communities, cities, oceans and our planet.

BottleHouse™ uses disregarded, empty plastic bottles and applies combined skills in architectural design, engineering and construction to transform this empty bottle into a building block – to form a temporary, but thermally comfortable, structurally sound, unique form of shelter that can protect the occupants from both solar radiation and precipitation. Its design provides a strong and stable, orientation agnostic form and its unique foundations anchor it to the earth. A resilient, life supporting, 100% recycled structure. An impermanent house, a home, a safer place.

The BottleHouse creates ‘bricks of the future’ from other peoples discarded plastic waste and deploys them for the benefit of society. The BottleHouse ecosystem including BottleHouse Hubs could create a global task force, employing local communities to help collect the ‘bricks of the future’, managing and orchestrating their collection and training communities in building shelters from plastic waste. Providing jobs, an income, security, education, new skills, shelter, hope and the chance of a better life. A new circular economy in the plastic economy.