Building eco-friendly homes with plastics

He is a man with difference. When the whole world is up against usage of plastics, he has different philosophy for using plastics. He says plastics can be useful to man if one puts his mind into it. He has developed a concept to use plastic pet bottles as brick to build houses. Waste management is his PET subject. Converting waste items into eco-friendly products is his favourite hobby. Meet the founder Chairman Dr. Patrick Sanfranceso of Non Profit Organization Samarpan Foundation who has launched their first pilot project in Chennai where the foundation is constructing a vocational training centre in Red Hills using plastic PET bottles. Excerpts…

Tell us about Samarpan Foundation?

Samarpan foundation was founded in 2006 in Delhi with a sole agenda that ‘whenever there is a need, we should attend to it’.  We started off doing social activities like slum development and child care and later started our own home for needy children. We now have our presence in Kolkata, Chandigarh, Chennai and Bangalore. Over the years, we have diversified our activities to areas involving socio-economic and environmental protection.

What are the notable activities you done in the recent months?

As I said earlier, whenever there is a need, we go and render our service, however small it can be. In Kashmir, during the Ladakh landslide in 2010 we built houses for those who lost it. As a community programme, we have now started dairy farming targeting women folks in the valley, who are a largely oppressed lot.  The farm is all-women type and all of them are equal shareholder of the farm they run. The idea is to make them economically independent.

We have also dug wells and put hand pumps in many villages surrounding Sundarbans in West Bengal. As the ground water available here is brackish and salty, people used to walk miles to fetch potable water. Though drinking water is available over 1000 ft no government agencies were ready to dig wells for these sparsely populated villages for political reasons.

When Cyclone Aila hit Sunderbans two years ago, we did rescue activities and also opened clinics in makeshift camps. The sad part is that most of the wildlife got perished in the flood. Deer and rhino were completely eliminated. Since they were the prey for tigers, they started attaching people once the flood water receded. More so, people, who have to travel miles to fetch water became easy prey to these hungry beast.

We brought two wagon loads of deer from Rann of Kutch in Gujarat which can survive in this brackish water and left them in the natural habitat. When tigers got their natural food, they spared people. We put up 23 wells of 1000-1500 ft deep in the villages and for that got special steel pipes from TATAs. All the villages have one hand pump each now and water problem is completely solved there. We are also planning to build hospitals for them but not getting government support.

You have touted an idea of making houses using waste plastic bottles. Can you throw some light on it?

We are working on various ‘waste management’ programmes. I found that simple pet bottles used for dirking water or aerated drinks are being dumped much to the discomfort of the environment. So, we decided to utilise its non-biodegradable quality to our advantage. When we filled these bottles with mud and put the cap on, it becomes as solid as a brick. We thought of using for construction purposes instead of brick. We did pressure test and found that these bottles are durable. More so, the ridges in the bottles stick well when applied mortar on it. To begin with, we had made an entire room in a Delhi school using pet bottles. Inside we use clay and lime and outside we covered the wall using mortar. Students say that this room is the coolest one in summer and warmest during winter.

Since the walls are as thick as the size of the bottle, it gives good insulation against the temperature variation. We also suggested to the Delhi Chief Minister Shiela Dikshit to make road dividers and pedestrian using pet bottles which will be more durable than the conventional one. She has readily agreed and the government has started making use of large sized coke bottles for this purpose. This way, we can utilize the waste plastic bottles to our advantage without straining the environment.

Can you elucidate your projects in Chennai?

In Chennai, we are going to make a vocational training centre in Red Hills using pet bottles. It will have two floors. The ground floor will have the centre and top floor for volunteers’ quarters. We call it as green house. It is green in many ways. One, it is made of waste products. Second the whole roof is going to be made of solar cells.

Normally in the northern hemisphere the solar cells are made to face south and southern hemisphere it would face north to get maximum sun. We are making East-West here and tilt the roof to get maximum sunlight throughout the day. Here the cells will charge the batteries during day time and in the night, batteries provide power. We realized that these batteries will become waste after few days and became environmentally unfriendly. So, we thought of having a new solar module without battery backup. Here the cells during the day would be used to pump water to the overhead tank and during night the water would slide down to drive a turbine to generate power. Since the cost involved here is high, we are planning to use solar cell to compress cylinder all through the day and release to operate a turbine to produce power.

Third and beautiful aspect of the green house is that in urban areas due to space constraint people don’t have much scope for greenery around their house.  We are working on a model where the outer wall of the house will be mounted with thin aluminum frame with small shelves. On the shelves the same pet bottles can be kept after slicing it from top and filling it with mud. We can grow small vegetable plants and irrigate through drip irrigation method. The same bottles can be used to decorate the front side of the house with flower plants. On the lower shelves of the rack, we can have plants like Citronella, which keeps mosquitoes away. So the house will be completely green in all aspect.  This is our pet project in Chennai.

For building the house in Red Hills we need more than a lakh bottles and have so far collected 30000 bottles filled with mud.  We have approached the nearby schools and asked the students to provide unused pet bottles from their house filled with mud. Children are participating overwhelmingly in the project. We feel that we are planting the awareness seed in young minds about the ill-effect of plastics and how to use it efficiently without affecting the environment.

Rain water harvesting system

The rain water harvesting system has become more popular across different states in the country. But we work on different concept.  Now take a city like Chennai. We don’t have steady monsoon rains here. As there is now proper ground water charging system, most of the precious rain water gets flushed into the sea. Also, stagnated water damages road and becomes breeding ground for mosquitoes.

We felt that by laying rain harvesting concrete trenches across the roads we can save a lot of water and also avoid water logging in low level areas.  Not only that we can save a lot of money in terms of laying roads frequently, these 10-ft trenches have four advantages. It charges the ground water, avoids roads getting flooded, reduces inconvenience to the road users and stops mosquito breeding. These trenches, cost Rs 30000 each, can be laid across the roads in just 48 hours without causing inconvenience to the road users. These trenches are covered with pre-cast concrete with draining pores. As these trenches are slightly sloped on both sides, water can go through the pores easily filtering waste materials like plastics on the side, which can be easily removed.

We installed same rain water trenches in the Jaipur palace and within three years it took up the  ground water to four inches.

We have done Rain Water harvesting pits done on the roads in Chennai which are far more effective than storm water draining as it helps not just in the limited cause of keeping water from accumulating but also provides for adequate catchment to improve levels of water for the city.

We are looking at corporations and builders to take up this system to prevent water stagnation in their project areas. Even colonies can have its own water harvesting system.  I want to make this project as people’s project.  All low lying areas should have four or five trenches to avoid flooding during the rainy season. Corporate too can come forward to sponsor this. This way the wells will never dry during summers and ground water will never go down.