The seaside house in Canada built from 600,000 recycled plastic bottles

It’s been dubbed the “Beach House” but this newly built Canadian home comes with something unusual inside its straightforward facade.

The three-bedroom, two-bathroom, 185-square-metre concept house, with ocean views, has been made from recycled PET plastic in a process that its construction firm, JD Composites, hopes can be replicated as an affordable and quick way of building.

The 184 prefab panels used to make its walls were put together by Ontario-based company Armacell, and were made of up about 612,000 plastic bottles melted down into tiny beads.

Lightweight but strong, they are 15 centimetres thick and all individually cut to fit the home’s design. They were assembled relatively quickly on the building site.

The panels are also good for insulation and soundproofing, and have withstood a 524km/h wind test at an Exova engineering facility, which is about twice the strength of the winds in a category five hurricane.

The now-finished home will be monitored for long-term durability, with plans to rent the house out as an Airbnb in the near future.

According to JD Composites, the total building cost including land was around $C490,000  ($535,829), with the design process starting in May last year. The panels themselves took about three weeks to construct, while the walls took a day to be assembled at the home’s final location.

Company co-owner Joel German recently told New Atlas that, in the future, JD Composites would not specialise in custom homes, but rather “projects that allow for volume sales – smaller dwellings, shelters, sheds, offices, sleeping barracks”.

Emergency housing as part of disaster relief efforts was also on the cards, he said.

He said building using recycled plastic was its way of attempting to tackle the problem of plastic waste, while developing a usable building product.

David Saulnier, another co-founder, thought its energy-efficient properties could save a potential owner up to $C80,000 ($87,370) over the lifespan of a 25-year mortgage.

Building with recycled plastic – and indeed, plastic bottles – has been undertaken in other places, with homes in projects like the Plastic Bottle Village in Panama advertised for sale.

Meanwhile Tanzanian schoolboy Edgar Tarimo was awarded the 2017 Children’s Climate Prize for his idea for making bricks out of plastic waste.