Hi, I'm Chris Dews. I'm the Founder and Director of this model ecology center
Casita Verde and also the main coordinator for Green House in Ibiza.
Since a very small child I've been very concerned about garbage in the
environment. I came here in 1985 when I was working in the Merchant Navy. We had the
same problems here as I've been looking at in the rest of the world so I started
off cleaning beaches and I founded the Casita Verde in 1993. I went on to found
was called the Ibiza Ecologic back in 1996 and it's then when I started
building with bottles and cans. Basically the idea is to get making the kind of
world where we'd all like to live. We can use this island Ibiza as the perfect
example of sustainable lifestyle technique. Not only just for tourism but
for just living anywhere. I've seen lots of things that we can apply to
anybody's farm, anybody's apartment, building, or your little town house as well. This is
a place where you can actually see these these lifestyle techniques in action and
have that sensation that you know you can do it as well.
You know nature doesn't throw anything away. The waste product from one organism
is the food for another organism so what we've been doing is gathering loads
of stuff out the local garbage. We get given stuff. This looks like a brand-new
chair from the shop, but it isn't. It was thrown away because all the wood was
broken and everything and we've completely refurbished it and now it looks
like brand-new. This is one that started life just as an asbestos roof.
It's made basically with old beer bottles stuck together with a mixture of
building plaster and local red earth and on the outside it's covered with sand
lime and coloring to make it this beautiful texture on the outside. We've
got one of these rocket stoves. They use very little wood and produce a lot of heat.
The gases that this produces in the combustion chamber goes through this big fat
tube which heats up this seat which is full of rocks and then when the fire
goes out at night all the heat comes out. We've got a nice double bed over here
and we've got a little office space over here. We've got some OSB board which is
compressed waste wood and above there we've got some yak wool which we were
given from a yurt. I got all these ideas by the way from a visit to the United
States when I went to meet Michael Reynolds, the inventor of the Earthships.
I started building things in very similar style over here. Let's go inside
again and have a look our media office.
Up here on the ceiling we have a three and a half meter satellite antenna
bus shelter roof, front window from a Renault four, and we've got a washing
machine door as another window idea. You can see the floors here two
different styles it's been made from broken tiles. The guy who built this obviously
a Gaudi fan. This is a German couple. It's a yin-yang symbol built on the floor here.
Have a little sign on here. This is for having a pee. A big mixing bowl here
that I got from the garbage, made some holes in the bottom. It sits on top of a
funnel and it goes and fertilizes the trees. This is the first eco-toilet that
I made back in 1996 out of beer tins and it's got a satellite antenna on the
top as a roof to collect the rainwater which goes into this tank here. There's
enough water in here to wash our hands all through the summer and it's going
off to water those lemon trees. There's two deposits underneath the floor
here. Both one cubic meter and when it's full we simply move the toilet seat and
put it at the other side here and we put this piece of concrete in there then
we've got another four months over here. This one's a bit bigger so you can get a
wheelchair in here. This one we built out of bricks and we made the bricks with
adobe. 60% sand 40% red earth and some straw. The bricks are stuck together with
the adobe without the straw in it. I've used a coca-cola kiosk roof and I put
a fiberglass channel around the outside to collect the water. You have pipes
coming out from the bottom chamber to take the gases out. If you extend them
one and a half meters up and you paint them matte black when the Sun shines on
there it draws all the gases out from the bottom chamber. Okay so you come here
with a wheelbarrow, you take out the pieces of wood, you take out the
compost, and we distribute it around the farm. We don't use this for the food
gardens better lean on the safe side just put it on ornamental plants and on the
bottom of fruit trees. We've also got a wind generator here. These are actually
assortment of panels from different friends of mine who've given me them over
the years. These used to cost an absolute fortune. Now you can buy a 320 watt panel
for about 150 euros. Easiest way is just lay them flat on the roof. You can't
see them not disturbing anybody and probably works just as well. In Spain
especially you can't even build a new house without having solar hot water
heater for domestic hot water. You can save more than 80 percent on your
domestic hot water bill by installing one of these devices. Here this is
the shower and washing machine area. A two square meter solar panel from the roof
of a hotel. It's connected to an old electrical water heater. You shower here
and it's going into a purist grass filter on the other side of the wall here
together with the washing machine water it gets filtered, the oxygen's added to it,
it then goes through a mint farm and goes on down to a tipper box
distribution system. It's made out of a couple of speedboat fuel tanks one
inside the other. Water comes through here it fills up this tray and the tray
just tips up when it's full and all the water goes out at the bottom in a wave.
There's 14 pipes going out to the bottom of the box. One to each of the garden plots there.
The garden's on a bit of a slope there so the water runs along the bottom
it's got a plastic lining and water then is absorbed up towards the roots of the
plants instead of the other way around putting on the top and going down we're
coming from the bottom coming up. What do you do with old CD's? I mean they're scratched
and everything. They just flash in the light and then it frightens the birds away.
When the council asphalted this road in 1999 they made a
channel so the water fell on the forest, didn't go onto the road, so we
just extended the pavement made a big 2 cubic meter tank here. The water
then goes from here over to another settling tank over there to the main tank here which is 80,000 liters.
In the summertime we just keep a little bit of water in case somebody leaves a tap on one day or
pipe falls off and we lose the whole thing. This is what the fire department
used actually to keep the water in and to put fires out in the forest so just got
the idea from them. When we run out of water in the summer time we truck in
water, put the back end of the truck in here, put the pipe into there and
bingo we go straight into the main tank without wasting a drop. This is
I used to cook rocks to make lime. We just put a roof on it, put a bed in here,
put some stairs going up, some stairs going down and made it into a duplex.
Every accommodation here is very different. Some people like somewhere really quiet
like a tomb and the other one's like a womb. So I like them to be comfortable so I just
put the people in the place that fits them. This is the Treehouse. It's one of
my favorite places to sit down actually on a Sunday on my tour.
This house was built in 1998. You could take it away in half a day and there'd be nothing here. That's the great
thing. It's a temporary building. Lamps I made a few years ago coconut shell some
sabina. Mainly a summertime house. Well you can use it from the middle of March
till November time. It's a live tree coming through the house so it's difficult for
sealing because of course it's growing. It doesn't move at all with the wind or
anything. It's protected by the tree. Carob trees have very deep roots
they're not affected at all by the presence of this house covering so many
meters. Still produces the same amount of fruit, certainly looks very healthy so you could put
one of these houses under every Carob tree on the island and this is probably
where the tourists would like to live because you know they'd much rather
stay in one of these than in a concrete box. This was a 350 liter electric water
heater has been converted into a cooker. A barrel oven. This one's made with a
200-liter oil barrel. We made this with brick. This is the blocks we made
covered with the same stuff on the outside, another satellite antenna on the
top, wood in here, and you take the ash out at the bottom. This one is built on a pallet
that was for carrying gas bottles. This actually is not an illegal construction
either because it's not connected to the floor. You can pick it up with a forklift
truck or a helicopter. A lot of space here. You can dance on here. We take these
picnic tables out. We have another rocket stove at the end there you can see the
portable one. This is a portable solar system. You have two big batteries here.
Charge controller and a DC to AC converter. You can pick it up and put it
in the back of the car. Between four guys it's not heavy at all. It just drives
all the lights and the music equipment inside the cave here.
Here's a little kind of dining area in this corner. In the summertime I run a
dehumidifying device in here all the time. In the wintertime we have a stove of
course to heat it up. This is a shaft. We've cut the top so that the circulation is there.
Stalactites you see they're more than six million years old. Tiles here where people dance.
It's great in here to have parties
get about fifteen people dancing.
So a tiny house made almost completely out of old pallets. Even the wheels are made out of pallets.
And what we do with pallets is we cut out the piece that we want, glue it and screw it
together and we burn the rest of the pallet. We haven't bought any wood since
we started building this project. It's not finished yet. It'll have an eco-toilet
eco-shower. All the features of Casita Verde have more in a very small space. For
those people who have a plane to catch. The solar system more or less installed. The
shower area, eco-toilet. Here will be the bedroom the kitchen area here with a
rocket stove, patio. We can cover it up in the winter time. Those Sabina trees as
our support as well at this end. It's gonna be an amazing tiny house example.
In the end we're all gonna have to live in these kind of places because
basically that's the bottom line. We can't all live in separate houses having
a washing machine and a cooker and a shower and a thing, where's the end line?
We're part of an ecosystem here. We're part of a complete
unit called Planet Earth. We have a part to play.
Think about where your trousers come from. Think about where your food comes
from. Think about where your washing liquid is
coming from and where's it going? All these little tiny things made by the
number of people that make those changes all added up makes a massive change on
the planet and that's what we're looking for. That's what we need.