Another Ingenious Use of Discarded Plastic Bottles

This inspirational story found its way to us from one of the poorest corners of the world: San Pedro, the Philippines.

In a community that was too poor to afford windows, the interiors of cinder block and corrugated metal shacks were perpetually dark, even on the brightest of days.

No longer.

With little more than trash, water, bleach and crude hand tools, green entrepreneurs hope to light one million homes within a year.

The solution? Take a discarded, two-liter plastic soda bottle, fill it with water and a teaspoon of bleach and install it in a hole cut through the home’s roof. When the sun shines on the bottle, the water refracts the light and yields the equivalent of a 55-watt light bulb—enough to light a room.

These lights have become so popular that a cottage industry (pun acknowledged) has emerged where installers are earning about $1 per light installed. In the first month alone, more than 1,000 bottle lights were put in. In fact, demand was so high that they temporarily ran out of bottles!

Great stuff!

Watch a video about this phenomenon.

This post originally appeared on www.GreenBusinessMatters.com.