Abstract

Port Harcourt formerly known as the Garden city of Nigeria was graced with the presence of green vegetations, landscape, and neat culture of the residence, now fondly called Garbage city As a result of indiscriminate dumping of waste on the streets and other urban infrastructure, leading to environmental issues like flooding, pollution, etc, and climatic issues like global warming. With plastic bottles identified as a major constituent of these wastes with its characteristic of being none biodegradable and durability, resulting to blockage of drains and canals and rapid filling of open waste dumps in the city. This paper tend to ascertain the impact of utilising these plastic bottle wastes as building material and its effect on achieving a sustainable solid waste management in port Harcourt, this was done by estimating the volume of plastic wastes that can be eliminated from waste dumps and used as a sustainable building material. Samples of plastic bottles were collected from waste bins around the city, measurements were taken and calculations done to estimate the quantity of plastic bottles of different sizes that can construct 1 square meter of a wall. Subsequently, a typical 2 bedroom bungalow design was used as a case study to determine an average quantity o plastic bottle to be used to construct the building. At the end, it was concluded that 1sqm of a wall require approximately 245 plastic bottles while the 2 bedroom bungalow with 307.6sqm wall area would require an average of 75,534 plastics bottles (about 3 metric tons) to be constructed. This result indicates that if the plastic bottle house innovation is massively adopted in the housing sector, it’s going to lead to a positive impact and a sustainable solid waste management practice in the city. And help contribute to efforts towards returning Port Harcourt to its Garden city status.

Keywords

solid waste, sustainable development, housing, plastic bottle, waste dump, biodegradable