Aurora Robson is a Canadian artist who has been working with garbage for over 10 years. During this time around 80 000 PET bottles went through her hands and easily 100 000 caps. In The Great Indoors instalation she had collected 15 000 PET bottles to assemble an exotic looking tunnel in a gallery. Not only she had collected the bottles on her own, but she also engages homeless and poor people in the collecting of bottles.
Currently, she is not only organising a collective of artists working with plastic debris called Project Vortex but she is also teaching a course on how to work with garbage.
Aurora Robson The Great Indoors 18 September – 26 October 2008
ECO Project with students of the Experimental studio Achten/Nováková at FA CTU Prague2014. Relax square was showing one minute production of PET bottles. It took only few hours to assemble.
Andreas Froese is a German active in Honduras, South America and who has developed a number of techniques to integrate PET bottles in building construction. For this purpose he started the company ECO-TEC in 2001 in Honduras. This company supports among other environmental issues the reuse of solid waste in architecture. Froeses’ developed building technique reduces the use of concrete in building to 40% of regular cost. The system uses the PET bottle as a brick, fills it with natural resources such as sand or mud, and sticks it clay and other locally produced garbage such as rubble and vermiculture. Froese usually employs people in social need which adds another dimension of sustainability to his approach.
In El Zamorano, Honduras, a house from 8000 PET bottles was constructed in 2003. The green roof in wet conditions can weigh up to 30 tons. Nevertheless, there are no extra reinforced supports other than the PET wall. This house is generally considered the first PET bottle house without the use of cement for the walls.
.
The project of PETree was started by PET-MAT (Nováková – Prokop) and Experimental studio Achten-Nováková at Fa CTU Prague with support of KMV a.s. It is a pilot project of an experimental construction made by selfbearing PET-bottle structure in form of a 5 meters tall christmas tree. The structure is hollow and works as an exhibition room in order to mediate information on the facts about reusable waste, focused on plastic garbage, represented by PET bottles. The tree has the aim to show the value of plastic PET garbage and its unbelievable quantity, which depends on consumers: all of us. The tree consists of 12 thousand 1,5l PET bottles, connected by wireframe and ropes. One Primary school and twelve highschools from Prague, Mladá Boleslav, Kolín, Slaný and Sedlčany took part on collection and they were also building a construction panel with decoration. The tree is enlightened at night with interesting lightshow delivered by IIM CVUT Prague. The PETree exhibition is open daily from 9 AM to 10 PM.
