New Country

A friend and I are thinking about making an island. I read an artical in a time magazine a few years ago about a man who build an island/raft out of soda bottles and lived on it while it floated around. I thought it sounded really cool, but very few other people thought so. I primarialy think it would be cool to enlarge it about 5000 times, and make a country out of it. The problem is how to make it. Soda bottles might work well for a person and a few palm trees (which the man transplated on to the island by covering the base with soil), but for at least 200people there would need to be some thing better. I then thought an aircraft cruiser but i don't have $2billion on me at the moment, so im frensh out of ideas. Any one else have any comments?

It would be good if you could use some recyclable materials, so you would be the pioneer of an idea that can chance the world

we are building a modle of it right now, my mom has lake property so we can test it out, we are making the modle out of 2leter soda bottles.