Building Classrooms With Plastic Bottles

Background

As recently as thirty years ago, plastic products were few and far between in Guatemala. Sodas came in glass bottles that were reused over and over. Tamales, cheese, tacos, and assorted snacks came wrapped in the leaves of local plants instead of plastic bags. And as a matter of habit, Guatemalans threw the leftover garbage on the ground without thinking twice because leaves biodegrade and disappear within weeks. Today, the same habits exist; people eat their snack, then chuck the garbage on the ground when they finish-up. But now that everything comes in plastic containers (chips, sodas, water, tacos, smoothies...even plastic bags come in plastic bags), this cultural habit has left Guatemala with a serious waste management crisis.

The great thing about plastic is that it's an incredibly strong material; it's light and extremely durable. However, the terrible thing about plastic is that it's too good of a product: it's cheap and doesn't breakdown. In fact, the average plastic bottle takes roughly 500 years to biodegrade. To put that in perspective, 500 years ago Columbus had just recently discovered the Americas. In the States we've been able to create sufficient infrastructure to breakdown plastic and resell it as a commodity, helping us to avoid the ubiquity of plastic that you find in Guatemala (and most of the Third World, I imagine). Here, in contrast, the common solution for disposing of plastic is to burn it, which creates a deadly toxin called dioxin. It's not uncommon to pass by makeshift landfills with plumes of smoke billowing from the embers of burning plastic below.

Given the lack of probability of investment in waste management, one must devise creative solutions to confront this issue. One such solution is using these plastic bottles to create bottle schools.

What is a bottle school?

The basic idea of a bottle school is that instead of building a classroom using cement blocks, you fill plastic bottles with plastic waste to the point where they're so dense you can use them as your building blocks. Given the fact that plastic takes about 500 years to breakdown, they're actually stronger (in some senses) than cement blocks. Also, these classrooms are safer in the event of an earthquake because they're more flexible and can move with the tremors. In the event that they do fall, plastic weighs much less than cement and would not crush someone like cement blocks would.

I met with a local school yesterday in a neighborhood called Mariscal to start the process of building a bottle school. They teachers couldn't be more excited and we're off to a great start. The project works on many levels. First of all, we're going to build a school for kids who are in dire need of more classroom space. Right now, in the school I visited, about 80 kids have class outside in a makeshift classroom made out of wood and a tin roof that feels like a sauna after about 9am when the Central American sun really starts to beat down. Second, after a project like this where we need to collect thousands of plastic bottles, the streets of San Rafael will be never have been so clean as they will be when we reach our goal of collecting 6,000 bottles and 420,000 plastic bags (about 70 plastic bags fit in each bottle). Third, the project involves the community because not only do the students have to collect five bottles a week for homework, but community members can drop off their stuffed bottles at a collection center in the central park on Sundays. To compliment the waste management lesson of the project itself, I'm also going to give environmental education classes throughout the weeks of bottle collecting. Fourth, and final point, these classrooms are extremely economic to make. Cutting out the cost of the cement blocks cuts the entire cost of building the classroom by about 40%, if not more.

To build the classroom you have to have the foundation: a cement floor, steal columns, and a corrugated tin roof. From there, you put sheets of chicken wire extending from one column to the next, on the inside and outside of the structure, creating a space in between (the width of the columns) where you put the bottles. After putting row after row of bottles between the chicken wire, the wall slowly takes shape. In the spaces that remain between the bottles, you put more plastic bags to fill any empty gaps. Then you apply the first layer of drywall (a cement mixture), then the second layer, and then you have your wall that looks like any other wall; it doesn't look makeshift. After a layer of paint, the bottle classroom is complete and classes can begin.

Here are a few photos from yesterday when I taught the students how to stuff their bottles. I'll also include some pics from a bottle school that another PCV built to show the process of building a bottle school.

This is one of the classrooms we want to replace with the bottle classroom


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Teaching the kids how to stuff their bottles with trash

(The following photos are from PCV Laura Kutner's site in Granados, Baja Verapaz.
We're using this project as a model for the school in San Rafael)

Placing the stuffed bottles in rows between the chicken wire

One of the walls with the first layer of dry wall

Exposed section of wall and completed section of wall

Final product