Liter of Light
Plastic bottles are literally shedding light into thousands of shanty homes in the Philippines.
Volunteers at NGO the MyShelter Foundation fill the discarded containers with a solution of water and bleach. In five minutes, they use a hammer, rivet, sandpaper, epoxy and metal sheets to fit one of these into a hole in a corrugated iron roof. The result is a bulb which diffuses 55W of sunlight.
This is the Liter of Light scheme, launched in July 2011. So far, 25,000 homes have benefited at a cost of just $1 per bottle.
The NGO aims to add the bulbs to 1 million such houses per year, a fraction of the 12 million in darkness or facing the loss of their electricity supply.
It is a decade since Brazilian Alfredo Moser came up with the idea of using a plastic bottle as a solar bulb. Students from MIT in the US modified the design for communities in Manila, and it has spread to India, Colombia and Vanuatu. It has also been hailed as a step towards tackling global warming.
Photography: Sidney Snoeck
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