Punch a bottle-sized hole in the corrugated iron roof of a shack. Insert a one-liter plastic bottle into the hole and seal it there—about a third of the bottle remains above the rooftop, exposed to the sunlight, two thirds of the bottle is suspended inside the home like a giant bulb.
Fill the bottle with filtered water, add a little bleach and you have a "solar bottle". The sunlight from above is refracted through the liquid into the gloom below, enough to brighten the entire room.
All at once you have not just an affordable source of light—critical for education, for homeworkers, for personal safety and for health—but a reuse for plastic bottles that prevents them from being thrown away to pollute the local area and the oceans beyond and a whole new zero-carbon grassroots industry that creates green jobs.
It’s a win-win-win. Except for the energy companies perhaps, as the whole process is so incredibly cost- and energy-efficient, using almost entirely recycled materials.
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