Discarded glass bottles rarely inspire visions of dream homes. Yet on Brazil’s sun-kissed Itamaracá Island, a mother and daughter decided to take apparent trash and use it as building material for a whimsical house. During pandemic beach clean-ups, socio-environmental educator Edna Dantas and sustainable-fashion designer Maria Gabrielly Dantas collected 8,000 bottles and, over two years, turned that waste into a glowing seven-room dwelling locals now call Casa de Sal (Salt House). Today the project stands as both a home and a living lesson in circular design… that you can visit and stay at through AirBnB.
The —literal— bottle house
When lockdown halted tourism, the Dantases saw Itamaracá’s litter problem up close and vowed to act. Starting in May 2020, they hauled bottle after bottle off the beaches, stockpiled recycled pallets and scrap timber, and by mid-2022 had finished a 70 m² structure containing seven cosy spaces. The first room was a cramped sewing studio; they had to was their dishes in a plastic basin since they didn’t have running water.
However, with much resilience, what began as a family shelter quickly morphed into a community workshop where neighbours learn simple ways to cut waste and build with what they already have.
How recycled bottles became building blocks
Despite what it might sound at first, the Casa de Sal* is surprisingly cozy, thanks to the bottles bricks. Some of the characteristics that make it unique are:
Vertical daylighting: Each bottle is set upright in a lime-sand mortar matrix, turning the walls into hundreds of sun-catchers that diffuse light and keep rooms naturally cool.
Thermal and acoustic perks: Trapped air in the bottles adds insulation, while thick glass muffles street noise.
Up-cycled extras: Interior partitions are framed with recycled pallet wood, and the roof tiles are pressed from discarded toothpaste-tube laminate.
Environmental ethos: Every bottle diverted here avoids landfilling roughly a kilogram of glass, meaning Casa de Sal kept about eight metric tons of material in circulation. That matters in a country where only 47 percent of glass bottles get recycled nationwide—a figure documented by Brazil’s Business Agreement for Recycling Association.
In Brazil, where decent housing remains a systemic challenge, projects like this one fuel tough questions: how does a nation with 5.8 million people homeless or in extreme poverty (per the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) uphold the right to housing?
At the same time, what happens to the trash produced by a consumer-driven economy, especially in tourism-heavy places like Itamaracá? “These bottles don’t just vanish,” Edna says. “If there’s no policy to curb production or penalize dumping, the least we can do is find ways to reuse them. Toss a bottle that doesn’t break and it’ll still be sitting there a year from now.”
Beyond sourcing materials, the build exposed the gender roadblocks that persist in trades long dominated by men. “We hoped to bring in workers only for specific tasks, but they kept weighing in, correcting us, and telling us how to do things—as if we couldn’t handle it,” Gabrielly says. “People act like we found a magic bottle with a genie inside. They don’t see the skill, planning, and vision behind it. In this field, being a woman makes it twice as hard.”
A global wave of recycled homes
Casa de Sal is part of a bigger movement proving that trash can become treasure. In New Mexico, architect Michael Reynolds’ Earthships use tires, cans and bottles to create off-grid dwellings that power themselves with sun and rain. Panama’s Plastic Bottle Village packs PET bottles inside steel frames to build entire neighbourhoods, while California’s historic Bottle Village showcases 1950s folk architecture fashioned from thousands of soda bottles. Each project rethinks shelter, cost and climate all at once.
Casa de Sal proves that “waste” is only wasted when imagination runs dry. Book a week in this recycled paradise and you’ll sleep behind kaleidoscopic glass walls, fund new clean-ups, and step straight into kayaking mangroves, meeting manatees and trekking forest trails—all in tune with the island’s gentle rhythm. It’s an invitation to trade traditional bricks for a brighter, bottle-bricked future—one recycled adventure at a time.