September 2, 2024, 3:44 pm | Read time: 4 minutes
Richart Sowa has redefined recycling in a very special way: Using plastic bottles and other “garbage”, he has not only created something new, but built an entire habitat in the form of a small island. He wants to live self-sufficiently on it one day and travel across the sea.
For many years, Richart Sowa honed his skills as a carpenter, roamed Europe as a street musician, and immersed himself in various spiritual communities on a quest for self-discovery. He now calls himself an eco-architect and lives in a lagoon on the Mexican island of Isla Mujeres on Joysxee Island – an island that he built himself from recycled garbage.
However, Joysxee Island wasn’t Sowa’s inaugural venture into crafting an island out of garbage – his initial creation, Spiral Island, took shape in Mexico in 1998. However, the island, which Sowa built with great effort, was destroyed by a hurricane in 2005. Shortly afterward, he began planning his second island made from garbage.
150,000 plastic bottles make the island float
To buoy his 25-meter (82-foot)-long island, Sowa ingeniously employs 150,000 plastic bottles. They are corralled together with the aid of repurposed fruit nets. He attaches the nets to wooden pallets, which he then covers with soil and repeats this several times. “It’s like lasagna. If you have garbage, then you have soil. And then garbage again, and then soil again,” he explains in a YouTube video. The many layers prevent seawater from reaching the top layer of soil, allowing various plants to grow on the surface of the island.
As the wooden pallets decay over time, stability has to be created in other ways. Sowa has planted mangroves for this purpose; the roots of the seawater plants also strengthen the island in the long term and hold the plastic bottles in place.
The island could survive without Sowa
In addition to his small forest, the environmentally conscious Brit has also cultivated a vegetable garden to provide for himself. The plants on the island could survive without him, as the Brit emphasizes in the YouTube video. A small ecosystem has formed. A small piece of land has been created from the old plastic bottles, which floats on the sea. “Most countries don’t recycle, and the population is growing so fast. With the plastic islands, we could create new land in many parts of the world, which in turn gives us more oxygen,” says the Brit.
To enable Sowa to live on the island, he has built a two-story house on it – made from recycled materials, of course. A third floor consists of a small observation tower.
Sowa has used whatever he could find in a colorful and creative way. There are taps, a shower and even a small “telephone” made from shells on Joysxee Island. The house is adorned with a loving touch, embracing a minimalist style that offers all the essentials for daily life. To get to the mainland, he uses his small boat, built from 1,000 plastic bottles.
In the near future, the free spirit wants to live completely self-sufficiently. While Sowa is already harnessing nature’s bounty by collecting rainwater and drawing energy from solar panels, these efforts are yet to suffice for complete self-sufficiency.
The Lost Gypsy THIS is the weirdest attraction in New Zealand
Those who get involved in the "ReGen Village" will pay less rent The revolutionary idea behind this village of the future
In Las Pozas, stairs lead to nowhere The bizarre jungle city that cost one man his fortune
Sowa wants to swim across the sea on his island
As the German business magazine “Wirtschaftswoche” reported, Sowa is planning to make the island mobile in the future and leave the lagoon. To this end, he wants to register Joysxee Island as an “ecological boat”.
As Sowa awaits the official nod, he extends an invitation to curious travelers, offering tours for a modest contribution to share insights into his self-reliant way of life.
“Everything has a purpose, and everything has a reason. There is always a principle and a lesson to be learned. We are in a big, eternal learning process. And we know that pollution and other problems exist and that there are more and more people on the planet. But the solution is here. And the solution is really great. We use all the stuff we don’t want. All the garbage that we don’t know what to do with can actually solve the world’s problems,” says the Brit in the YouTube video about his island.