Cindy Mora saved for nine years to buy a plot of land in Alajuelita, Costa Rica, and waited several more years before she could live on it. The wait ended with a 72-square-meter home built with 850 recycled plastic blocks, the result of an alliance between Habitat for Humanity, Procter & Gamble, Urbarium and Ekojunto. Her story is circulating across the region’s media and reviving the debate over affordable housing.
Can plastic waste become a building material capable of easing the housing deficit that weighs on Latin America?
A Borrowed Room
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
Cindy Mora was 30 years old when she managed to buy a lot in Alajuelita, a canton neighboring San José, with the money she had saved over nearly a decade of work. Until then, she shared a room with her son Fabrizio in her parents’ house, an arrangement that lasted until the boy turned seven. The land came in 2018, but the purchase drained her savings and construction remained out of reach.
The way out came through philanthropy. Mora presented her case to nonprofit organizations and qualified for a program led by the construction company Urbarium, joined by Procter & Gamble, Habitat for Humanity Costa Rica and Ekojunto, the company behind the block system. The organizations contributed money, materials, logistics and volunteer labor until they completed a 72-square-meter home, 12 meters long by six meters wide.
«I used to live with my parents in Alajuelita, in one room. Now I have all this space,» Mora told the press upon receiving the keys, on a May 26 that she and her son had awaited for years.
Blocks That Snap Together Like Toy Pieces
The walls of the house went up with 850 blocks made from bottles, bags, packaging and plastic auto parts. A private plant shredded and melted that material into pieces about 50 centimeters long, 10 centimeters high and 3.7 centimeters thick, which interlock with one another like a children’s building set. The system is called Bloqueplás, a technology patented in Colombia and already in use in Costa Rica, Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Ecuador and Spain.
The method belongs to the family of modular construction systems, meaning prefabricated pieces that arrive ready at the site and snap into place without wet mixes in the walls. That format explains the project’s speed: volunteers assembled the structure in seven days, and accounts of the case mention more than 800 hours of donated labor. Plastic did not replace the entire build. The foundation, the roof, the electrical wiring and the plumbing were handled with conventional techniques, and the facade received plaster and wood finishes that give it the look of a traditional house.
Thermal Promises and Numbers That Don’t Add Up
Mora highlights how the walls behave: on hot days the interior stays cool, and when the temperature drops the opposite happens, while the walls also absorb much of the outside noise. The promoters add other virtues, such as fire resistance, tolerance to flooding and the option of leaving the walls unpainted. Information released about the project even mentions a useful life of up to 200 years, although that figure comes from the promoters themselves and no independent laboratory has verified it in public.
The plastic tallies also fail to match across sources. El Tiempo reported that the blocks weighed about two and a half metric tons, while Costa Rican broadcaster Teletica and Urbarium’s own materials spoke at the time of 7 to 7.5 tons of recovered waste. There is a larger gap: a fact-check published by the Spanish outlet OKDiario traced the origin of the case and found that the build took place in 2018, starting on April 23 and delivered on May 26 of that year, which means the 2026 headlines retold a story that happened eight years earlier. Those of us who read these inspiring stories would do well to check the dates before sharing them.
A Deficit That Forces People to Improvise
The enthusiasm around the case makes more sense against the regional backdrop. The Inter-American Development Bank estimated that one in three families in Latin America and the Caribbean lives in inadequate housing or homes built with substandard materials, a condition affecting some 59 million people. Facing such a gap, governments move slowly and families improvise solutions for decades, just as Mora did in her parents’ spare room.
Initiatives that turn waste into building material have flourished in that vacuum. In Bogotá, architect Óscar Méndez founded Conceptos Plásticos, a company that manufactures Lego-style plastic bricks and trains families with no experience to assemble their own homes in a few days. In Costa Rica, an alliance between Habitat for Humanity, Dow, the firm CRDC and the builder Pedregal delivered the Valle Azul project in 2021, with 102 homes whose concrete blocks incorporate the RESIN8 aggregate, made from 90 tons of recovered plastic. The Alajuelita house belongs to that current.
The Limits of a Good Idea
It is worth measuring the real reach of these experiences. The two and a half tons of plastic in Mora’s house, or even the seven and a half in the more generous versions, represent a tiny fraction of the millions of tons of waste the region discards every year. Building with recovered material helps, but the bulk of the problem demands reduction policies and collection systems that today rest on the shoulders of poorly paid informal recyclers.
Specialists keep several technical questions open. How plastic behaves under extreme heat, the possible release of microplastics, certification under seismic codes and banks’ willingness to finance unconventional systems remain under discussion within the industry. Add the economic factor: the Alajuelita home existed thanks to donations and volunteer work, and scaling the model requires a cost per square meter that competes with concrete block without philanthropic subsidies in between.
In summary, Cindy Mora’s house shows that discarded plastic can become livable walls when companies, foundations and volunteers coordinate their efforts. The experience does not solve the housing deficit or the waste crisis on its own, and some of the project’s figures remain in dispute, but it opens a path that Latin America would do well to explore with technical rigor and without triumphalism.
References:
- Sánchez Fajardo, C. (2026, 24 de agosto). Madre soltera ahorró nueve años y construyó una casa con 850 bloques de plástico reciclado. El Tiempo. https://www.eltiempo.com/cultura/gente/madre-soltera-ahorro-nueve-anos-y-construyo-una-casa-con-850-bloques-de-plastico-reciclado-antes-vivia-en-un-cuarto-ahora-tengo-todo-este-espacio-3580568
- Redacción El Imparcial. (2026, 6 de agosto). Nueve años después de invertir todos sus ahorros en un terreno vacío, una mujer recibió una casa construida con 850 bloques de plástico reciclado. El Imparcial. https://www.elimparcial.com/locurioso/2026/08/06/
- Redacción La República. (2026, 20 de agosto). Pasó 9 años ahorrando para comprar un terreno y terminó construyendo su casa con 7 toneladas de plástico reciclado. La República. https://larepublica.pe/mundo/2026/08/20/
- Talent24h. (2026). Ahorró nueve años para comprar un terreno y recibió una casa levantada con más de siete toneladas de plástico reciclado. OKDiario. https://talent24h.okdiario.com/
- Hábitat para la Humanidad América Latina y el Caribe. (2021). 102 viviendas eco-sostenibles reutilizan 90 toneladas de plástico. https://www.habitat.org/lac-es/newsroom/2021/102-viviendas-eco-sostenibles-reutilizan-90-toneladas-de-plastico
- Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo. (2012). Un espacio para el desarrollo: los mercados de vivienda en América Latina y el Caribe. BID.
- Grupo Bloqueplás. (s. f.). Sistema Constructivo Bloqueplás. MIT Solve. https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/RethinkPlastics-es/solutions/15417