Brazilian builders Edna and Maria Gabrielly Dantas turned 8,000 discarded bottles from Itamaracá's beaches into a fully livable home, reported Black Enterprise.
The mother-daughter duo were discouraged by the debris tourists left in their coastal community. Visitors littered thousands of bottles across protected environmental zones each season.
Edna, who works as a socio-environmental educator, and her daughter Maria Gabrielly, who designs sustainable fashion, married their passions to turn this waste crisis into an innovative building opportunity.
The home's construction took multiple years. In addition to bottles, the mother-daughter pair incorporated recycled timber, empty toothpaste containers, and shipping pallets into the house.
Edna's upbringing shaped her resourceful approach. Growing up in Brazil's drought-affected Agreste region taught her to repurpose simple materials.
"My childhood was marked by creativity. I made my own bamboo toys, and recycled whatever I could. We didn't know it was environmental activism, it was just how we survived," Edna said.
The resulting home, called the Salt House, demonstrates the innovative, cost-effective construction methods Edna learned in childhood: Using discarded materials to reduce building expenses compared to traditional supplies.
The Salt House's glass bottle walls, which insulate the home, are both creative and practical. This natural temperature regulation foregoes the excessive energy consumption that heating or cooling systems require.
Unfortunately, the building process wasn't free of trouble. Both mother and daughter faced discrimination in the male-dominated building industry.
"We wanted to hire labor only for specific tasks, but [contractors] always wanted to give opinions, correct us, tell us how to do things, as if we lacked capability," Maria shared. "People think that one day we found a magic bottle with a genie inside.
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Heck yeah 💯 "They don't realize this requires skill, management, vision. And being a woman in this environment is doubly hard."
Thankfully, the women persevered, proving the naysayers wrong and gaining plenty of admirers on social media.
"So creative and so beautiful," one user commented on Instagram.
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