Aussie unveils flyblown pyramid in Egypt

Not far from Egypt's treasured trio of ancient pyramids, Australian entrepreneur Mike Smith has built one of his own.

It's not pretty. It stinks. And it's a magnet for flies.

But Smith sees a unique kind of majesty in the reeking, three-storey structure made from a million or so compressed plastic bottles pulled from the Nile River.

It's the first of many such structures his company plans to build around the world as part of an ambitious, 100-year clean-up and change campaign aimed at single-use plastics.

"It's an audacious project we're launching, with an aim of cleaning the planet every year, for the next 100 years," he says.

"The goal is to be able to pull 15 million water bottles worth of rubbish out of the natural environment, every year, all around the world."

Smith is aiming to raise an initial $1 million by selling bragging rights for bundles of recovered plastic waste, like the ones he's roped together to make the pyramid, about an hour's drive from the real things at Giza.

From $20 a pop, supporters can help fund the next big clean up.

There's already one planned in the Himalayas, and another that will use divers to simultaneously cleanse ocean locations across the globe.

"With every clean-up we do, we'll be doing something similar with the waste - attention-grabbing things to rally the world and drive awareness about the waste problem and hopefully inspire people to join us."

Smith chose to build his first fetid formation in Egypt because world leaders are about to gather there for this year's United Nations climate change summit.

He's disappointed the colossal waste problem will receive relatively little attention at the event, given it is an inherent driver of the climate crisis.

"Plastic is a huge contributor to the fossil fuel industry. About 20 per cent of oil production is being siphoned off to make virgin plastic which gets used once, thrown in the bin, even in developed countries like Australia.

"The federal government released a waste report in 2020 that showed that less than 15 per cent of all the plastic we use actually gets recycled.

"So there's this kind of this myth that making plastic is fine as long as you put it in the yellow bin because it gets recycled and turned into something else, which is just categorically not true."

He says many people don't understand that plastic can only be recycle once, or twice at best.

"If we continue this cycle from extracting oil, making stuff, chucking it away, we're never going to solve either problem - global warming or waste. They are intrinsically linked."

Smith is the founder of Zero Co, which makes personal care and cleaning products with no single use plastics.

He jokes that it's model, based on the perpetual reuse of the same containers, refilled time and time again, is a "radical new business model that our grandparents used to use".

For the next three nights, as world leaders descend on the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Smith will be sleeping inside a small tent on top of his plastic pyramid.

"It's stinky and there's lots of flies. It's very uncomfortable. It's going to be gross but hopefully it's a crazy enough scheme to get a lot of people's attention."