In October 2010, San Diego nonprofit Hug It Forward completed the building of their fourth green school – or “bottle school” – in a rural Guatemalan village close to Central America’s tallest volcano. Prior to Hug It Forward’s partnership with Nueva Reforma to construct a new school by recycling plastic bottles, two grades of village primary students crammed into each of the existing school rooms and a makeshift shack.
Upon identifying the need for a lot more adequate classroom space, project facilitator and Peace Corps Volunteer Jamie Staples worked with community leaders to initiate a community-led effort to gather plastic bottles and non-biodegradable products from the streets. Kids and parents stuffed the collected bottles with plastic bags and other inorganic waste. Local construction workers and masons then stacked the recycled plastic bottles in the walls, secured them with chicken wire, and finished the walls with layered stucco. At the end of the project, the bottle schools diverted 3,000 pounds of garbage out of local landfill and rivers.
Manifest Foundation, Hug It Forward’s primary sponsor since April 2010, supplied the funding for building of the environmentally friendly school in Nueva Reforma while the community contributed the skilled and unskilled labor necessary.
“The bottle school has been a source of pride for a community that otherwise has very little in terms of infrastructure. It doubled the square footage of classroom space and gives a space for community gatherings such as meetings, elections, and dances,” says Staples. In addition to tackling infrastructural needs via financial and technical assistance, Hug It Forward is committed to serving local communities and project facilitators in educating local youth concerning recycling, upcycling and environmental awareness.
“They have a lot more respect for nature than individuals in ‘developed’ nations like the US. The challenge is that they do not understand that plastic bottles take hundreds of years to biodegrade, that they lead to a hazard to the natural world and tourism and that the fumes of burning plastic material are toxic,” says Heenal Rajani of Hug It Forward.
Where there once stood a lean-to construct of bamboo and rusting corrugated metal roofing now stands a new baby-blue building that is eco-friendly with ample special comfort to accommodate all six grade levels.
Hug It Forward finished its inaugural bottle schools in Nov 2009. During the following year, they have scaled their endeavors from that one school to four finished schools with three more at this time under construction and plans to build 5 more in the coming months. As a result, Hug It Forward and its partner communities have successfully eliminated more than 8 tons of trash from the environment and increased Guatemalan educational square footage by almost 4,400 sq ft.
