Community Waste Management Environmental Educational Socio-Green(Up)Building Activism!




In Grenades Guatemala, elementary students learned about green building, the environment, waste management, and build themselves a school in the process all with the help of Laura Kutner. While serving in the Peace Corps Kutner was helping out at one of the local elementary schools. She was asked to help raise funds for the completion of two classrooms that had already been framed. She obliged and noticed the frame was the width of the plastic soda bottle in her hand and thought immediately of a fellow volunteer who was constructing building blocks out of plastic bottles stuffed with inorganic trash called Eco-Bricks. She thought this building method might be a cost efficient approach to finishing the classrooms.
With the help of neighboring students and littering citizens, the elementary school collected 8000 Eco-Bricks. At about one pound per Eco-Brick, that's 8000 pounds of garbage picked up off the ground and put into a wall, a wall that is even more flexible in earthquake territory than cement blocks.

Kutner knows that its not just the new classrooms that are important, nor the six new "bottle schools" recently built that are important but it's the underlying educational aspect of the project that is important as she states here: "The real long-term goal of these projects is the educational aspect to it, because this is not a long-term solution to trash management in any way, but just the educational aspect in learning how long it takes trash to decompose and what you can do with trash, and how much we produce. We produce enough trash to build buildings with it. And also, bringing communities together...it's in every sense of the word, a win-win."

I said it before and I'll say it again, us humans are good are creating waste, now we need to be creative with our waste. Waste management and recycling are going to be crucial survival skills for future generations. This building method and grassroots community organizing helps teach students to be conscience of their environment and more aware of their effect on it, while producing a positive outcome for themselves and their community. In an area where there was no conventional system set in place to recycle, the people created a way to recycle. This instills in the students the very essence of recycling at its most basic form. This is also a testament the volunteers of the Peace Corps, who can make the best of what they are given, a notion that is at heart, sustainability.


Link to Podcast: http://www.loe.org/shows/shows.htm?programID=11-P13-00006#feature6
Link to Bottle Schools website: http://hugitforward.com/