- 20 February 2012
A solar bottle being prepared for installation. (Source: YouTube screenshot)
The idea is literally illuminating. Discarded plastic bottles filled up with water and a bit of bleach light up the slum houses of Manila.
Here, dwellings are packed so close together that people live in darkness even during the daytime. Electrical lighting, assuming that a power supply is even available, is prohibitively expensive and many people, social entrepreneur Illac Diaz found, ended up being cut off by the electricity companies because they couldn’t afford their bills.
According to statistics from the Philippine National Electrification Commission in 2009, 3 million households on the outskirts of Manila were without power.
Diaz’s smart solution, originally invented in 2002 in Brazil and further developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is as simple as it is brilliant.
Punch a bottle-sized hole in the corrugated iron roof of a shack. Insert a one-liter plastic bottle into the hole and seal it there—about a third of the bottle remains above the rooftop, exposed to the sunlight, two thirds of the bottle is suspended inside the home like a giant bulb.
Fill the bottle with filtered water, add a little bleach and you have a "solar bottle". The sunlight from above is refracted through the liquid into the gloom below, enough to brighten the entire room.
All at once you have not just an affordable source of light—critical for education, for homeworkers, for personal safety and for health—but a reuse for plastic bottles that prevents them from being thrown away to pollute the local area and the oceans beyond and a whole new zero-carbon grassroots industry that creates green jobs.
It’s a win-win-win. Except for the energy companies perhaps, as the whole process is so incredibly cost- and energy-efficient, using almost entirely recycled materials.
The solar bottles can be assembled and installed for about one dollar apiece, says Diaz in his TEDxDubai talk on the solar bottle phenomenon, and each one will last for about 10 years.
Diaz, founder of the ‘Liter of Light’ project, wants to brighten up one million homes not only in the Philippines but in shantytowns in India, Africa and other southeast Asian countries, by the end of 2012.
It is part of his continued work for the improvement conditions for the over 800 million slum dwellers worldwide. Under the umbrella of his foundation MyShelter, he set up Pier One Seafarer’s Dormitory, a lodging place in Manila that provides seafarers with budget accommodation.
Diaz’s idea is spreading fast. Within a few months of starting up Liter of Light managed to install about 10,000 solar bottles. His project is very popular and has received widespread support throughout society. Even the military and prisoners in jail have joined in the production of solar bottles.
The United Nations has declared 2012 to be the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All. There can surely be no better example of that ethos than the solar bottles lighting up the lives of the poorest people in Manila.
Want to creat your own solar bottle? Click here to see a step-by-step assembly video.
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