Katrin Macmillan was on my Climate Change radio show Green Angle on Aso 93.5fm, a few months back to discuss indoor air pollution and efficient wood stove as alternative. She also told my audience and I about recycling and Nigeria‘s first bottle house, constructed from recycled plastic bottles in Kaduna State.Thought to also share this innovation on the blog.The house has been built using earth-filled plastic bottle ‘bricks’ and mud. The three-room structure is so sturdy that it could stand for thousands of years. Plastic bottles take hundreds years to biodegrade in landfill. In Nigeria millions of plastic bottles are dumped into waterways and landfill each year causing pollution, erosion, irrigation blockages and health problems.Bottle houses take this dangerous waste out of the environment and make it useful. Katrin Macmillan launched Nigeria’s bottle recycling programme in December 2010. Used plastic bottles and their lids are now being collected from hotels, restaurants, homes and embassies and, so far, thousands of bottles have been collected for the bottle house builds.
Yahaya Ahmed, CEO of Development Association for Renewable Energies (DARE), set out to build energy-autonomous houses from recycled materials. DARE have brought Andres Froesse, founder of Eco-Tec Soluciones Ambientales, to Nigeria to train local masons in the bottle building technique. Land for Nigeria’s first bottle building was donated to the project by engineer Chris Vassilou. The bottle house will be solar powered, with a fuel-efficient clean cookstove, urine filtration fertilisation systems and water purification tanks, thereby making it energy autonomous. The next Nigerian bottle building project is a school hall in Seluja at the Africa School of Excellence, which urgently needs classroom space. The school children are being trained in the bottle brick making technique and the newly trained masons will lead the build in January 2012. A similar project was undertaken in Guatemala. Former Peace Corp volunteer Laura Kutner, behind the Guatemala “Trash to Treasure” project told Bruce Gellerman of Living on Earth, Boston, about the project which she refereed to as a win-win as villages are cleaner and children are getting new schools.
“Nigeria has a serious waste and energy problem and this project is one small step towards making positive changes. This project can be easily replicated and is a wonderful way to enable Nigeria to recycle in a creative and practical way. Following on from this first Nigerian bottle house the children at the African School of Excellence in Seluja have started making the bottle ‘bricks’ for their new school hall and students will be involved throughout the build. The school hall will take 200,000 bottles out of landfill and into education.” – Katrin Macmillan American Embassy,Centre for Disease Control, Protea Hotel, British High Commission,Hilton Hotel, British Council Rooftop Café, Chez Victor, USAID, Chelsea Hotel, Heinrich Boell Foundation Photos by Katrin Macmillan and Center for Water and Environment Development (CWED). Got lots of bottles to donate? Skip to main content Chair of Population Health View Contact Info (UT Directory)
View Bill's assistant, Brigid Keenan, contact information Dr. William Tierney is the inaugural Chair of the Department of Population Health, and a professor of Population Health, at the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a general internist and medical informaticist who came to the Dell Medical School after serving as President and CEO of the Regenstrief Institute, Inc., the country’s oldest research institution dedicated to improving health systems. The Regenstrief Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports the research and service missions of the Indiana University School of Medicine where Dr. Tierney was Associate Dean for Clinical Effectiveness Research and practiced general internal medicine at Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis where he was Chief of Internal Medicine from 2009 to 2014. Dr. Tierney’s research focuses on improving health care delivery and its outcomes through developing and implementing electronic health record systems (EHRs) in hospital and outpatient venues in Indiana and in East Africa.
His team of developers implemented sub-Saharan Africa’s first ambulatory EHR in 2000 which has grown and evolved into OpenMRS, the world’s most widely used open-source EHR system that’s been implemented in more than 40 countries and nationally in all Ministry of Health sites in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Dr. Tierney is a member of the Institute of Medicine and the Association of American Physicians and is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics and Master of the American College of Physicians. He has received the lifetime achievement award from the nation’s leading organizations in three disciplines: academic general internal medicine (from the Society of General Internal Medicine), biomedical informatics (from the American College of Medical Informatics), and translational science (from the Society for Clinical and Translational Science). He is the former Co-Editor of the Journal of General Internal Medicine and Medical Care.
He’s received more than $30 million in grants and contracts and has published 290 peer-reviewed medical journal articles. His publications have been cited by others more than 20,000 times.All around the globe companies and individuals are starting to produce fuel from waste plastic. As only 8% of waste plastic is recycled in the U.S., 15% in Western Europe, and much less in developing countries, this reuse of plastic could potentially keep enormous amounts of plastic out of landfills and out of the oceans. Over 500 billion pounds of new plastic is manufactured each year and roughly 33% of that is single use and thrown away. As so little plastic is recycled, we need to reframe plastic waste as an underused resource vs. one that’s destined for the landfill. If all plastic waste made it into the landfill, it would surely be mined in the future, but currently all plastic waste does not make it into our landfills. The United Nations estimates plastic accounts for four-fifths of the accumulated garbage in the world’s oceans.
We need to stop polluting our oceans with plastic before it is too late, and start collecting all plastics suitable for this new, fairly simple, technology, a technology that is available now. The technology is not overly complicated. plastics are shredded and then heated in an oxygen-free chamber (known as pyrolysis) to about 400 degrees celsius. As the plastics boil, gas is separated out and often reused to fuel the machine itself. The fuel is then distilled and filtered. Because the entire process takes place inside a vacuum and the plastic is melted – not burned, minimal to no resultant toxins are released into the air, as all the gases and or sludge are reused to fuel the machine. For this technology, the type of plastic you convert to fuel is important. If you burn pure hydrocarbons, such as polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP), you will produce a fuel that burns fairly clean. But burn PVC, and large amounts of chlorine will corrode the reactor and pollute the environment.
Burning PETE releases oxygen into the oxygen deprived chamber thereby slowing the processing, and PETE recycles efficiently at recycling centers, so it is best to recycle PETE traditionally. HDPE (jugs) and LDPE (bags and films) are basically polyethylene so usable as fuel as well, just slightly more polluting as a thicker heavier fuel is created. But additional processing can turn even HDPE into a clean diesel. “Polyethylene and polypropylene are pure hydrocarbons, only they are arranged in long chains. The best thing, of course, would be to stop using plastic water bottles completely. We recommend these eco-friendly, reusable water bottles. In Niagara Falls, NY, John Bordynuik’s ‘Plastic Eating Monster‘ can even vaporize thick HDPE plastic into a cleaner burning number 2 fuel. Put plastic in one end of the machine and out the other end comes diesel, petroleum distillate, light naphtha and gases such as methane, ethane, butane and propane. The machine accepts unwashed, unsorted waste plastics, composites and commingled materials and returns about 1 gallon of fuel from 8.3 pounds of plastic.
And the processor uses its own off-gases as fuel, therefore using minimal energy to run the machine. John has two massive steel processors up and running, with financing secured for three more to be built in the very near future. In the Philippines, Poly-Green Technology and Resources Inc. was started by Jayme Navarro whose sister asked him to come up with a way to recycle plastic bags. A plant is being built that will produce 5,000 kilos of fuel per day. Cynar in the UK likes to call their product ‘End of Life Plastic to Diesel’ or ELPD. Their technology converts mixed Waste Plastics into synthetic fuels that are cleaner, low in sulphur and in the case of the diesel, a higher cetane than generic diesel fuel. They have two plants running in Spain. Each Cynar plant can process up to 20 tons of End of Life Plastic per day, producing 5,000 gallons (19,000 litres) of high quality liquid fuels at a conversion rate of 95%. Cynar will be supplying Jeremy Rowsell, a British insurance industry executive who lives in Australia, with all the plastic waste fuel he needs to fly a single-engine Cessna from Sydney to London this winter.
Fuel will be in place at about 10 locations along the 10,500-mile route. The solo journey dubbed ‘On Wings of Waste‘ is intended to heighten awareness of this new fuel. Of course, it would be the best if there were widespread environmentally friendly plastics in use, but in the meantime, recycling existing plastics into fuel would keep the plastics out of our waterways. This process is also excellent for difficult to recycle PP and PE plastics like bottle caps, appliance plastics, nursery planters and dirty plastics such as meat wrappings. This process is not suitable for PVC or polystyrene (styrofoam). This technology could also reduce carting issues, as companies that deal with plastic waste could build mini-burners on location. I am ready for a plastic collection can on my corner, how about you? Many questions as to which technology is the most efficient and least polluting…Boasts easy installation, high efficiency, no second-time pollution. Plant converts 6,000 tons of plastic into nearly a million barrels yearly.