Building a school from trash in Guatemala

This story was originally covered by PRI’s Living on Earth. For more, listen to the audio above.

Waste management can be a problem for parts of Guatemala. Recycling is unavailable throughout much of the country. In the central Guatemalan town of Grenados, though, people have come up with an innovative new program that turns plastic bottles into walls for schools.

The idea came about almost by accident, according to Peace Corps volunteer Laura Kutner. Grenados had built a frame for two classrooms, and the principal asked for help finishing them. “I was hanging out at recess with some of my students and I was drinking a Coca-Cola,” Kutner told Living on Earth. “And it was in a 600mL bottle, and I realized that the bottle was the exact width of the metal frame that was sitting there.”

Kutner had heard about a program that used plastic bottles for building material. “A little lightbulb went off in my head,” she said, “and I thought, well, maybe we could apply this construction technique of building out of bottles with this metal frame, and perhaps it will be, you know, a more cost-efficient way of finishing these classrooms.”

The bottles are stuffed with plastic bags and other inorganic trash to insulate them. They’re bound in chicken wire, attached to a frame and covered with up to 3 layers of concrete.

“We calculated that we needed to collect 6,000 bottles,” Kutner said, “but we ended up using over 8,000.” They cleaned the entire town and ended up cleaning up neighboring towns, too, to get enough trash.

The technique “has huge potential,” Kutner told Living on Earth. The structure is actually more flexible than other buildings and resistant to earthquakes, which can be a problem in Guatemala. “Since our project has been completed,” Kutner says, “I have received email inquiries and questions from all over the world — from Haiti, from the Philippines, from Africa — people that are working and want to turn trash into building blocks.”

The school itself is an accomplishment, but “the real long-term goal of these projects is the educational aspect to it,” Kutner says. “This is not a long-term solution to trash management in any way,” she admits, but it gets people thinking about sustainable waste management and transfers real-world skills. ” And also, “bringing communities together,” she emphasizes. “It’s in every sense of the word, a win-win.”

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Hosted by Steve Curwood, “Living on Earth” is an award-winning environmental news program that delves into the leading issues affecting the world we inhabit. More about “Living on Earth.”