In early June, Rome offered a unique experience to its visitors – a chance to spend the night in a hotel mostly built by rubbish. Save the Beach Hotel was built by the environmental activists with the Save the Beach associations, and this hotel accommodated its guests for only four days. There are five rooms and the reception in the hotel, and its construction took 12 tonnes of waste collected on the beaches throughout Europe.

The first guest was its ambassador, once a super model, Helen Christensen, who is an environmental activist herself and who finds this strange structure to be a true artwork. “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. 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. If you collected waste from the beaches throughout Europe for one year, you could build a city of the size of New York”, Christensen said.

The hotel was designed by an artist, HA Schult, and the structure is located next to the Roman castle Sant Angelo. “We are in the trash time. We produce trash and we will be trash. So this hotel is the mirror of the situation. We have to change the world, before the world changes us “, said the designer on this occasion. The hotel officially opened on 4^th June, and special guests had a chance to spend only four nights there. However, it will certainly remain there for a while as a reminder of negligence that people show towards the planet Earth.