The more you look around your environment, the more you see you can make for yourself, and this is often what gets you starting a business, you see something missing or not being done the right way and decide that you’ll do it your way and see if that helps. What if you really care about the environment, are looking for a simple yet fully involved life, well Richie Sowa decided he’d take thousands of plastic bottles and use them as the foundations for making a fully self sufficient island.
2 years and the worlds 1st fully self sufficient island
The above video is an overview of Richies 1st Island, made of some 250,000 plastic bottles he built a fully self sufficient island, with everything from 2 beaches, a home to a composting toilet and wave powered washing machine.As you would well expect there are heaps of risks in doing this, and the first island was destroyed in a hurricane (after surviving 2 others), but like everything good, it takes time, you learn from your experiences and with persistence, you create something great, so Richie is back into making the second island and collecting plastic bottles from trash cans everywhere to do it, here’s how quickly he’s progressing with version 2.
Step 1: From humble beginnings
The way Richie builds an island is by putting empty used plastic bottles into nets and linking them together. Then he covers them with a composting base and other earth. While it starts off very simple and small, you’re able to keep extending the island with more plastic bottles by spiraling outwards, so he’s called it Spiral Island.
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2 months into building
On the right here is Richies second island, just 2 months into building, he’s getting the plants in place nice and early this time around, and has a pretty cool little base which he can keep extending out.
Wakey Wakey, something real is brewing
Pretty inspirational stuff, and gets you thinking about what real solutions are and what real value is. Real value has to add something back to the world in the most fundamental of ways, and right now with massive waste issues and peoples a wide spread disconnection of people from their physical surroundings from over immersion in media, this sort of thing is a real awakener. Richie cares about the environment, he cares about making the world a better place, and he’s given himself the time and space to make something real happen.
