The Archival Eco House

Green houses or eco homes that has gained ground in the United States and few other places in the West may be quite unknown in the Philippines but historically, Filipinos have relatively simple houses due to the fact that they lived in a tropical country so it is common to find nipa huts made from nipa and coconut leaves, coco lumber and even river and sea rocks. Way back when before the widespread use of heavy building materials like brick, stone and Western-style homes brought by Spanish and American colonizers, Filipinos have already made good use of scarce materials.

Fast forward to our time, the growing emphasis of eco-friendly materials has been popularized by a local city politician named Nestor Archival with an efficient reuse and recycle of under-/un-utilized materials from empty bottles, worn out tires and even product packaging from PET bottles to non-biodegradable plastics. He also championed the use of composting of recycle waste food to convert it to cheap fertilizer.

The property, located in Barangay Talamban, is not just an ordinary home but also a popular tourist destination due to its unique and interesting features that most of us have not seen before. The ingenious and creative ways of maximizing the use of materials that we normally thrown away is inspiring because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to do it.

One of the things that make it a self-sustaining ecosystem is the fact that they grew their food and even the animals in the farm house eat waste fruits and vegetables collected from local markets and restaurants. The animals' waste material are reused to fertilized the organic vegetables grown there. To lessen the reliance of power from the grid, it is equipped with solar panels.

Aside from that, all animal and human waste are used in the bio-gas facility to convert it to fuel used to cook food. The eco house also collect unused wood from all over the city from rough-cut lumber to tree stumps and transformed it to wonderful wood-cut items from plates to play houses!

The use of aquaponics technology is bringing eco-friendly to the next level because this time, you plant without soil but with water containing fish waste. In return, the plant filters the water for the aquarium where the fish thrives. All biodegradable materials are shredded, mixed with cement in order to make eco bricks that can be used as building materials even stronger than regular hollow blocks commonly used in the country.

An engineer by profession, Mr. Archival has reused a lot of these materials in the building of the house such as colored glass from beer bottles where natural light illuminates the interior like stained glass. If you happen to visit Cebu, go ahead and visit this interesting eco home!