Over 1.5 billion people today do not have access to adequate housing. One billion of them live in self-built slums. During Rushabh Chheda's final year of architecture at TU Delft, he worked on an idea to create affordable self-built housing using local plastic waste to empower vulnerable communities to build their own houses. Chheda's idea is to use plastic waste to create interlocking building blocks that are designed for a simple, stackable technique of construction with a self-locking design, making housing construction simpler, cheaper, faster and most importantly, more sustainable.

Chheda is an architect and has lived almost all his life in Mumbai, India. He started his masters three years ago at TU Delft, where he chose to study innovation and sustainability-driven projects. His personal motivation and passion as an architect and a designer is to work towards creating meaningful ideas that are relevant socially, economically and environmentally, which also forms the vision of his startup venture, 'Conscious Designs.'

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx