On Brazil’s Itamaracá Island, a mother and daughter teamed up to construct the Salt House, a unique residence crafted entirely from recycled plastic.
They collect 8,000 glass bottles and build a house with seven rooms in two years: “It has our signature on it”
Itamaracá is an island in the state of Pernambuco, known for its pristine beaches, biodiversity, and, in recent years, growing urban pressure and the effects of mass tourism. There, right in the heart of an Environmental Protection Area, Edna and Maria Gabrielly Dantas decided to take action against a reality they knew well: tons of waste, especially glass bottles, abandoned after peak tourist seasons.
Edna, 55, a socio-environmental educator born in the impoverished Brazilian Agreste — a semi-arid region where access to water has historically been a challenge — grew up in a family that reused materials out of necessity and awareness. “My childhood was marked by creativity. I made my own bamboo toys, recycled whatever I could. We didn’t know it was environmental activism, it was just how we survived,” she told Globo.
She passed this philosophy on to her daughter, 27-year-old sustainable fashion designer Maria Gabrielly. They share not only a family bond but also a Quilombola and Indigenous cultural heritage — communities descended from slaves and native peoples who maintain a strong spiritual connection to nature.
An architecture of resistance
During the pandemic, seeing the amount of waste piling up on the beaches, Edna had an idea: “I want to build a house with glass bottles.” Thus, the Salt House project was born. In two years, mother and daughter built a structure made with recycled wood and over 8,000 bottles, collected and reused with their own techniques.
The house has seven rooms, walls made of glass carefully assembled, partitions built from recycled pallets, and even roof tiles made from toothpaste tubes. The first room, just 20 square meters, served as a sewing workshop while construction progressed. “The first year and a half was pure ingenuity: no conventional bathroom, washing dishes in a basin. But we never lost sight of our vision,” Gabrielly recalls.
Social critique made into a home
In Brazil, where access to decent housing is a structural problem, projects like this spark debate: how is the right to shelter managed in a country with 5.8 million people homeless or living in extreme poverty, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics?
At the same time, what can be done with the waste generated by the consumer economy, especially in tourism-intensive contexts like Itamaracá? “These bottles aren’t going to disappear. Without policies to regulate their production or penalize abandonment, the least we can do is find ways to reuse them. If you throw a bottle away and it doesn’t break, it’ll still be there in a year,” Edna warns.
Besides the material challenge, the construction process revealed the gender barriers that still exist in traditionally male-dominated fields. “We wanted to hire labor only for specific tasks, but they always wanted to give opinions, correct us, tell us how to do things — as if we lacked capability,” Gabrielly shares. “People think one day we found a magic bottle with a genie inside. They don’t realize this requires skill, management, vision. And being a woman in this environment is doubly hard.”
To an outside observer, the Salt House might seem an architectural oddity. But to its creators, it’s the future. A home that doesn’t hide its humble origins nor its revolutionary goal. A place built from waste that, in truth, is full of purpose.
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