Rome Builds a Hotel From Beach Trash

Last week a hotel constructed from rubbish collected from beaches opened its doors in Rome, to highlight the growing problem of litter in European beaches. The Corona Save the Beach Hotel was built using 12 tonnes of trash, including plastic bottles, cans and even car exhaust pipes collected from the Capocotta beach in Rome.

"Teaming up with environmental artist HA Schult, best known for his extraordinary ‘Trash Men’, we have created a pop-up hotel in the centre of Rome made almost entirely from rubbish collected from beaches across Europe," says its creators.

The hotel's first visitor was Danish supermodel Helena Christensen who spent a night in there.

"When you're inside the house, there are walls as there would be in a normal house, but they are all made of inorganic waste," Ms Christensen, who is also an environmental campaigner, told the BBC. "And then the outside... is completely covered in everything that we throw on beaches.

"And so you can basically just go around the house, and look at a lot of very personal objects, and some of them make you really wonder what made a human being throw this away on a beach."

The hotel, which stands beside the 2nd Century Castel Sant'Angelo on the banks of the Tiber, was open for only 4 days from June 3 to June 7.