Entrepreneur Illac Diaz is aiming to help a million poor people in a year with the help of some plastic bottles and a clever social media campaign.
Mr Diaz’s project appears simple – fill discarded soft drink bottles with water, place them in roofs of houses and allow the refracted light to brighten homes during the day instead of using electric bulbs.
However, what began as a small-scale effort in a Manila slum early this year has quickly spread throughout the Philippines and even into impoverished communities as far away as Colombia, India and Vanuatu.
It has also earned Mr Diaz accolades from the United Nations, which will bring him to its climate change summit in South Africa next week to show world leaders how “solar light bottles” are helping to tackle global warming.
“This has blown us away,” Mr Diaz, head of MyShelter Foundation, said of the international reaction to the project that is in part due to a powerful YouTube clip and smart use of social media sites such as Facebook.
More than 15,000 solar light bottles have been installed in slums around the Philippine capital this year, and the project was set to ramp up with another 10,000 to be put in homes.
Mr Diaz said another 100,000 would be installed in the Philippines’ second-biggest city, Cebu, in December, putting the project on track to meet or exceed its goals of helping one million people over 12 months.
“This is a grass-roots revolution, a people-powered revolution, using simple and low-cost technologies,” said Mr Diaz said.
He described the bottle concept as the opposite of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth model, which he said required poor countries to import or develop clean energy technologies such as windmills and solar panels.
Mr Diaz said a single solar light bottle each year saved 17 kilograms of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that causes global warming, compared with a household using an electric light bulb instead.
The solar light bulb emits the same amount of light as a 55 watt electric globe, and is expected to last for up to five years, according to Mr Diaz.
All that is required is a disused soft drink bottle, which is then filled with purified water and a small amount of bleach to stop any bacteria from growing.
The bottle is then placed inside a hole in the roof and sealed so that rain does not leak through. When the light passes through the bottle, it refracts and shoots into the room in all directions.