Nova Scotian house built from plastic bottles is a world first

In Meteghan River, Nova Scotia, sits a home made from 600,000 recycled plastic bottles.

Built by JD Composites, the house was opened to the public for the first time this week.

“We've heard so many bad things about plastic, there's so much negativity, it's nice to finally hear something positive,” says David Saulnier, one half of JD Composites.

Saulnier and his business partner Joel German first began talking about building a house entirely from plastic composites in March 2018.

“What we wanted to do was try to achieve a solution in housing using composites,” Saulnier tells NEWS 95.7's The Todd Veinotte Show. “I have a background in composites in boat-building and composite structures, and I decided to use 100 per cent recycled PET plastic.”

The duo got in touch with one of just four major PET manufacturers in the world, Armacell.

“We sourced it from a company in Brampton, Ontario. We took their raw product, brought it down to Meteghan, Nova Scotia here in our factory and started designing and making panels for a beach house,” says Saulnier.

The design was completed the following winter, and assembled on-site at the waterfront, two-acre plot.

“Everything was premade, there's about 178 panels in the house,” Saulnier explains.

But although the core building material is different, the creator explains that the inside is much like a normal home.

“We use regular two-by-four walls for the inside of the house,” he says. “The material within the walls, we have fiberglass skins on each side of the core, and the recycled plastic is the core. it's six inches thick. It's its own vapour barrier, it's its own insulation.”

Saulnier says the structural integrity is as good as, or even better than a customary house.

“The living room has a two-inch crown in the ceiling with composite beams that support a rooftop terrace. We had 60 people up there at our open house,” he says.

A photo of the house in Meteghan, N.S. (Photo via JD Composites Facebook Page)

The designer says his team is “tickled pink” with the attention the home has gotten, reaching news outlets as far as Russia, Egypt and England.

“We didn't expect the global impact this fast, we were caught by surprise by it,” Saulnier says. “It's week one after the release and we're still spinning from all the press.”

Once the buzz from the release dies down, Saulnier says the house will go on the market. But for now, it's listed on home rental site AirBnb.

“It's fully furnished, so it's basically a turnkey home, so it'll probably be in the high $400,000s,” Saulnier reveals.

And Saulnier says there's no question whether there's a market for more homes to be built from plastic.

“Out of the four major PET manufacturers, globally they're using 0.004 per cent of available PET right now,” he explains.

When JD Composites learned the home was first of its kind, they patented their wall system design.

“It hasn't been done yet on the planet,” says Saulnier. “A woman in Australia was thinking of doing it with bio-resins, but she hasn't done it yet, they're still doing their research. So here we are in Meteghan River with the world's first.”

Although he's been inundated with requests already, Saulnier think it's a good thing people are taking an interest in doing something with our plastic waste.

“We have over 600,000 bottles in this house,” he says. “Could you imagine if you have 10,000 homes, using half a million bottles per house?”