Students from the School of Architecture and Design at New York Institute of Technology have come up with a way to use discarded plastic bottles as roofing materials. The team used water and soda bottles to create a tile type design for roof repair easy to create by people in areas struck by disaster.
The Soda Bottle Interface Bracket (SodaBIB) project is for building a simple emergency roof that can be put together with no other tools but a hammer. They wanted to design a roof system that could be constructed without the use of electricity or tools that many people did not have access to during a disaster.
Creates Tile Effect For Water To Drain Off
The bottles are connected by a plastic fastener with holes the size of water bottle caps. The bottom layer of bottles is smashed into a concave shape and screwed into the fastener then a solid bottle is placed on top of it and screwed into another hole creating a tile like effect when the bottles overlap each other.
Pallets were redesigned to incorporate the plastic supports into a self-contained unit. When the bottles of water were shipped to disaster victims they would not have to locate the connecting plastic fastener. The pallet will have a series of holes for the empty bottles to be screwed into and reused for the immediate roofing.
Jason Van Nest, associate professor in the School of Architecture and design said “And what we are most excited about with this project is that the pallet ends up getting disassembled practically without any tools. Individuals can break it into building material and then merely crush the bottles.”
