This has to be one of the most awesome things I’ve come across yet. Rishi Sowa built himself an island from discarded soda pop bottles. I love his ingenuity and innovative spirit.

Sowa is a musician, artist, and carpenter. Now in his fifties, he is an environmentalist who believes in recycling and low-impact living. He moved from his native England to Puerto Aventuras in Mexico where he built his first Spiral Island. It sported a two-story house, a solar oven, a self-composting toilet, and three beaches. He used some 250,000 bottles for the 66ft (20 m) by 54 ft (16 m) structure. The mangroves were planted to help keep the island cool, and some of them rose up to 15 ft (5 m) high.

His first island was destroyed by Hurricane Emily in 2005. The island did not sink, but was instead thrown up on the beach almost completely intact.

There appear to be some other practical problems also (someone mentioned that eventually condensation would render the bottles unable to float) but Sowa soldiers on and is building his second Spiral Island, this time near Cancun in a location less prone to Hurricanes. See how he built it:

I hope everybody who supports such innovation will go check out Rishi’s progress at http://www.spiralislanders.com and support his venture in any way you can.

One way you could do this is by selling fund raiser bags to all your friends and acquaintances. To do this, order 100 of these bags with us by writing to me at rajiv at badlani dot com and asking for the Spiral Island bag.

I can ship them to you wherever you are at just US$ 4.99 and you could sell them at US$ 19.99 and the send your 15 buck profit to Rishi to continue with his wonderful project. 15 x 100= $ 1500. If just a hundred people do this Rishi will have $ 150,000 to help evolve Spiral Island II…

Let’s all do our bit to help Spiral Island happen.

Stumble it!