In 2012, Robert Bezeau began looking closely at the waste piling up on Isla Colón in Panama's Bocas del Toro archipelago. The Canadian entrepreneur had moved to the islands a few years earlier and was struck by the amount of trash in an area heavily visited by tourists. That year, he helped start a recycling effort to understand what was being thrown away and where it was ending up, and he noticed that plastic bottles quickly emerged as one of the most visible parts of the problem. The project collected waste from across the island, and Bezeau later expanded the effort by collecting discarded bottles from businesses. The bottles became the material inside the walls of houses. The idea grew into Panama's Plastic Bottle Village, a development built around structures that use discarded PET bottles as part of their construction. The project's own account says Bezeau's recycling program began in 2012 and that more than a million bottles were accumulated over about a year and a half.
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