A no throw-away vacation.

• Author: Dempsey, Mary A.
• Position: A US Virgin Islands vacation villa made of recycled and reusable products - Ojo

WHEN CARIBBEAN VISITORS board planes home, they take luggage, souvenirs and vacation memories. But they leave behind trash--and its disposal is a thorny issue in the islands. In the U.S. Virgin Islands, entrepreneur Stanley Selengut has a plan for that garbage: make vacationers live in it.

Inspired two years ago by a U.S. National Park Service workshop on sustainable design, Selengut has built a vacation villa made entirely of recycled and reusable products. An opponent of earthmoving machinery, he bulldozed no roads for his new vacation lodge on the island of St. John and cut out no utility ditches. Instead, construction workers cleared only the trees needed to accommodate a compact pair of two-level buildings situated on a hillside overlooking a beach and surrounded by a national park. Builder Nelson Uzzell drove nails of recycled galvanized steel into joists shaped from compressed waste wood. Eschewing noisy diesel generators, he used a solar-powered saw to slice wall board that, in a previous life, was newspaper. He laid patio tiles that were once rubber tires and cut boards of plastic wood for exterior decks.

"We're probably going to have the most beautiful home made of garbage you'll ever see," Uzzell explained. Not only does the luxury villa, called Harmony, sport an eye-pleasing design, but each suite is luxuriously equipped with muslin sheets and thick down pillows. Guests wash with biodegradable soaps and chill drinks with solar ice makers. Here, eco-friendly does not mean rustic, Selengut points out proudly. The discarded plastic bottles that went into Harmony's throw rugs and the crushed lightbulbs transformed into its tiles came from mainland U.S. waste, but Selengut promised it won't be long before the Virgin Islands create manufacturing jobs by transforming its own garbage into building...