The Man Who’s Building Homes From Plastic Bottles

In only a few decades there will be more pieces of plastic in the sea than fish. Robert Bezeau made it his mission to do something good with all that trash.

After collecting more than a million plastic bottles, Robert Bezeau made an unconventional decision — he turned those bottles into timber for a house on the tiny Panamanian island of Bocas del Toro. But his vision for a new kind of mass recycling program doesn’t end there. Next, he wants to build an entire village out of plastic bottles. It’s not that crazy of an idea: Given our penchant for bottled water, one study has found that there could be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050. So essentially anything else is preferable — no matter how out of the ordinary. Recently, MEL Films went down to Panama to spend some time with the first inhabitants of Bezeau’s eco-community; check out how they live among all that plastic above.