Painted red, the platform at the far end of the football ground of Adithya Institute of Technology is something novel. Eight Civil Engineering students of the College built it with waste water bottles. Siva Sankar, K.Ajith , G. Naveen Kumar, Gopi Krishnan, John Sebastian, V.Nachiyappan, S. Sarath Kumar and M. Naveen are behind this concept.
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According to Chitra Manohar, CEO of the college, K. Vijayakarthikeyan, city municipal commissioner liked the idea enough to sanction space nearAvinashilingam University for constructing a toilet using this method. “This initiative was also recognised by the Swacch Bharat Mission”, she says.
According to Krishnan, their quest for an eco-friendly project led them to an online search where they learnt about buildings in some African countries that used using plastic bottles for construction. The eight students then collected used plastic water bottles from hostels, wedding reception halls and the Coimbatore Central railway station. They piled them into a truck given to them by the college for this purpose. “We took turns to drive it around the city, collecting used plastic pet bottles. We wanted around 3000 bottles which took us about a month to gather,”, says N.Naveen.
They now needed a filling material for the bottles and for that they used foundry sand that is usually discarded as a waste product. “We initially thought of using river sand. Our teacher, D. Suji, gave us the idea of using foundry sand. This way we were recycling the foundry sand too,” adds Siva Sankar.
They manually filled the bottles with the sand which was a tedious and a time consuming process. According to G. Naveen Kumar, “It took us nearly 10 minutes to fill up two bottles. If this process can be mechanised, it will take much less time.”
There were mistakes. “Initially we loosely filled the bottles with foundry soil. But we realised the bottle was strong only when tightly packed. So, we had to refill the bottles all over again,” says John Sebastian. The students analysed the strength of the bottle with a compression test and claim that “it is much stronger than the usual bricks that we use.”
After the bottles were filled, the construction of the platform took around 10 days. “Other than the bottles, we followed the traditional construction methods. We arranged the bottles and concreted it using cement”, says Sharath. The prototype structure cost them ₹10000 and saved nearly ₹25000. “We got funds from our college. Made with regular bricks, this structure would have cost ₹ 35000,” says Nachiyappan.
The lesson they learnt from this project, they say, is how this method could reduce construction costs significantly, and take care of the plastic bottle menace the planet faces right now.
