Description
Planned obsolescence is the practice of designing products to become outdated as soon as newer versions hit the market, driving consumers to discard perfectly functional items. This cycle applies to digital devices and everyday objects, generating massive quantities of waste and environmental damage. Among this waste are plastic water bottles (PET bottles), which flood landfills and persist in the environment indefinitely due to plastic’s non-biodegradable nature.
Yet in some of the world’s most resource-constrained communities, these discarded bottles have found a second life. In São Paulo’s favelas, residents like Mr. Antenor Feitosa transform PET bottles into furniture, creating functional household items from what others discard. In Nigeria, where adequate housing remains scarce and construction materials are expensive, innovators have begun incorporating plastic bottles as brick substitutes in home construction. In Colombia, farmers of mixed European and Indigenous descent are often marginalized and pushed towards landfills. Forced to scavenge the landfills, these citizens construct entire homes from plastic bottles and cardboard from society’s waste.
For Colombia’s displaced farmers, these bottle-constructed homes represent more than survival. They stand as deliberate acts of protest; they are visible monuments to governmental neglect and forced displacement that demand public accountability. This strategy has proven effective as international media outlets have documented these bottle-constructed initiatives across all three locations. This media attention amplifies the residents’ struggles and innovative responses. Beyond generating attention, these communities perform vital environmental work, diverting tons of plastic waste from ecosystems where it would otherwise pollute and persist for centuries. What developed nations discard as trash, these communities have reimagined as building blocks, both literal and metaphorical, for survival and resistance.
Connection to Mobile Networked Creativity
Homes constructed from plastic bottles exemplify Mobile Networked Creativity by demonstrating how severe mobility constraints and resource scarcity catalyze collective innovation. In these marginalized communities, creativity emerges not from individual genius or abstract inspiration, but from survival. This crucial survival compels neighbors to collaborate, generating together knowledge and labor to transform worthless plastic waste into structural building materials. This grassroots ingenuity simultaneously addresses an immediate housing crisis and functions as a powerful political protest. It makes visible the systemic neglect that forces families to live in structures built from garbage. Bottle homes do not romanticize poverty, but instead reveal how creativity becomes inseparable from material conditions. They prove that creativity in underserved communities is a necessary response to displacement, exclusion, and the failure of institutions to provide basic human needs. The bottles themselves become a medium of resistance, exposing the environmental devastation formed by consumer culture and the resourcefulness of those abandoned by it.
Location
Various locations, with prominent examples in Nigeria, the favelas of São Paulo, Brazil, and Colombia.
To Learn more
- Germán A. Quimbayo Ruiz, Juha Kotilainen, and Matti Salo, “Reterritorialization Practices and Strategies of Campesinos in the Urban Frontier of Bogotá, Colombia,” Land Use Policy 99 (December 1, 2020): 105058.
- Mateja Celestina, Living Displacement : The Loss and Making of Place in Colombia (Manchester University Press, 2018).
- Bar, F., Weber, M. S., & Pisani, F. (2016). Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: Baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism. New Media & Society, 18(4), 617-636. (Original work published 2016)
- Kyungeun Sung, “A Review on Upcycling: Current Body of Literature, Knowledge Gaps and a Way Forward,” 2015, 28.
- “Upcycling Definition,” Wayback Machine, 2020.
- Ben Bridgens et al., “Creative Upcycling: Reconnecting People, Materials and Place through Making,” Journal of Cleaner Production 189 (July 2018): 145–54.
- Rodrigo Casarin, “The Paraisópolis favela is beyond violence: There’s even a house made of plastic bottles,” Universo Online, 2016.
- Sam Olukoya, “Nigeria’s plastic bottle house,” BBC News, 2011.
- Nettrice R. Gaskins, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation: Culturally Relevant Making Inside and Outside of the Classroom (The MIT Press, 2021).
- Tafline Laylin, “Africa’s First Plastic Bottle house Rises in Nigeria,” InHabitat, 2011.