How We Could End Homelessness in One Year With Something We All Throw Away Every Day:
If America really cared about solving the problem of homelessness among it?s citizenry, here?s an idea that would work. Oh- and that opening line references the fact that as far back as 2011 empty houses in America outnumbered homeless families by five times, according to Amnesty International.
Anyway, let?s say the problem with homeless people in America was a result of not enough housing. Then, this idea would work.
Did you know that you can make houses out of plastic bottles? By filling them with sand, and molding them together with mud or cement, the walls created are actually bullet proof, fire proof, and will maintain a comfortable indoor temperature of 64 degrees in the summer time.
And it?s not like there is any shortage on used plastic bottles out there. Here are some statistics from treehugger.com:
The United States uses 129.6 Million plastic bottles per day! That?s 47.3 Billion plastic bottles per year. About 80% of those plastic bottles end up in a landfill!
1500 plastic bottles per second
60 seconds per minute X 60 minutes = 3600 seconds per hour
3600 seconds X 24 hours per day = 86400 seconds per day
1500 plastic bottles per second X 86400 seconds per day = 129,600,000 plastic bottles per day
47.3 Billion plastic bottles per year
To build a two bedroom, 1200 square foot home, it takes about 14,000 bottles.
The United States throws away enough plastic bottles to build 9257 of these 2 bedroom houses per day! That?s just over 3.35 million homes, the same number of homeless people in America.
Many people in third world countries have taken up building homes out of plastic bottles, from Africa to Asia. Perhaps the trend will catch on in America and all of those bottles will stop ending up in the landfills. Wouldn?t they be better off housing the homeless? Kinda like all those empty houses scattered all over the country?
