In October 2010, San Diego nonprofit Hug It Forward completed the construction of their 4th green school – or “bottle school” – in a rural Guatemalan village near Central America’s tallest volcano. Prior to Hug It Forward’s partnership with Nueva Reforma to create a new school by recycling plastic bottles, two grades of village primary students crammed into each of the present classrooms and a makeshift shack.
Upon realizing the necessity for much 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. Youngsters and mothers and fathers stuffed the collected bottles with plastic bags and other inorganic waste. Local building 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 trash out of nearby landfill and rivers.
Manifest Foundation, Hug It Forward’s major sponsor since April 2010, supplied the financing for construction of the sustainable 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 neighborhood that otherwise has extremely little in terms of infrastructure. It doubled the square footage of school room space and provides a area for community gatherings like meetings, elections, and dances,” says Staples. In addition to tackling infrastructural requirements by means of finance and technical assistance, Hug It Forward is dedicated to serving local communities and project facilitators in training local youth about recycling, upcycling and environmental awareness.
“They possess much more respect for nature than individuals in ‘developed’ countries like the US. The challenge is that they do not realize 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 are toxic,” says Heenal Rajani of Hug It Forward.
Where 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 November 2009. During the subsequent year, they have scaled their endeavors from that one school to four finished schools with three more at the moment under construction and plans to build 5 more in the coming months. As a result, Hug It Forward and its partner communities have successfully removed over 8 tons of trash from the environment and increased Guatemalan academic square footage by almost 4,400 sq ft.
