Hotel Aaculaax
Ecological Construction - Plastic Recycling
Plastic Walls
In our modern society, it is difficult to avoid plastic waste, and especially so in a hotel. In San Marcos, which has no garbage collection system, the locals dump their waste into fields and unused lots; even some foreigners have no better solution. However, most foreigners living locally dump their garbage into holes in the ground or else they burn it. Sooner or later, each of these options causes the contamination of ground water. At Aaculaax, we knew we had to find a better solution. We had already built a house with volcanic pumice stones and thought we could fill the cavity of a wall with clean plastic waste. We built cement posts (5" x 5" or 1.5m x 1.5m) with a distance of 6" (1.8m) between each. On both sides of the wall, we fastened chicken wire and pulled it tight, leaving us with a cavity inside the wall into which we could stuff clean plastic waste. We were amazed at how much plastic the wall could hold.
To compress the plastic tightly and maximize the amount of waste in a given wall, we stuffed “soft” plastics, like bags and labels, into plastic cola bottles using sticks or metal bars. We also filled these plastic bottles with cigarette butts, and in doing so, found a solution to a particularly nasty and yet common form of waste. Aaculaax’s collected garbage of 2 years wasn’t enough to fill the 6" (1.8m) high wall, so we collected plastic garbage from our neighbors’ land. After the wall was completely filled, we covered it with cement plaster. The result was a wall that looks and feels the same as a regular wall built out of adobe or cement block, but this one was insulated with plastics.
Other people in San Marcos have begun constructing with plastics, helping to ease an otherwise large local litter problem.