Building Schools with Bottles

By Tracy Vonder Brink

Is your school made of bricks or concrete blocks? Many are. But some classrooms in Guatemala and EI Salvador were built a different way—with bottles full of trash! Hug It Forward—bottle schools use plastic bottles, trash, and lots of community helpers. Let’s see how they do it!

First, kids and other helpers pick up trash. They’ll burn plastic bags and chip wrappers into eco-bricks. Each classroom takes about 3,500 eco-bricks to build. That’s around one ton of trash!

To make eco-bricks, the kids stuff empty plastic bags and chip wrappers into cleaned plastic bottles. They need about 80 plastic bags or around 100 chip wrappers to fill one bottle all the way to the top.

Helpers from the community build frames for the classroom walls. They add chicken wire to hold the eco-bricks.

The eco-bricks are tied in rows between the layers of chicken wire. Any gaps are filled with more plastic bags.

Rows and rows of eco-bricks make up the walls. They are just as strong and last as long as other kinds of walls.

Mr. Klarke works in an agricultural college. There he taught his students how to keep the seeds and when to sow them and how to look after the plants. He knows much and makes his classes lively and interesting. So he is respected.

One day he was asked to give a talk in a town. On his way there, something was wrong with his car at a foot of a hill. He tried to repair it, but he failed and he had to climb up the hill and ask the villagers there for help. It was very hot that day and soon he felt thirsty. He saw a lot of pear trees in a garden. And a young man was picking them in it.

“I say, young man!” said the old man, “Could you give me some pears, please?”

In fact the young man was one of his students and he recognized him at once. He wanted to have a joke with him. So he answered, “Of course, sir. Do you want the hot ones or cold ones?”

It made Mr. Klarke feel strange. He thought to himself, “I’ve never heard of hot pears. Well, let me tell him I want some hot ones.” And he said as he thought.

Having heard this, the young man threw some pears to the ground. Mr. Klarke picked them up, blew the dust off them and ate them up.

“You said they were hot, but why were they cold?” asked the old man.

“What did you blow them for, then, Mr. Klarke?” said the young man with a smile.

Morning is the most important part of the workday for Mi Ying, the 47-year-old headmaster of Huishi Primary School in Shanghai.

Miss Mi is always at the school gate when it opens at 7: 40 am. “I can tell if the children are happy by saying hello to them and seeing their faces,” said she.“I want every student to enjoy their time at the school.”

Huishi, founded in 1870, is one of the city’s oldest schools. It now has around 2,600 students in 58 classes. Teachers here have their own special ways of teaching. Miss Mi is one of them.

When Miss Mi was just a math teacher 20 years ago, she took her students to the park or the subway station to have lessons. In 2001, a tree older than 100 years in the school became her teaching tool. She asked her students to come up with ways to size its height, and they provided more than 20 different answers. Miss Mi believed students could learn better through this way than just reading textbooks.

In the school, the relationships between teachers and students are also great. For some special kids, such as those with disabilities or special talent, teachers pay close attention to them and always provide them with whatever help they may need. Miss Mi said that her office is always open so that students can talk to her whatever they want.

Besides great teachers, there are interesting activities after school like Peking Opera, paper art, many students began to show interest in the traditional Chinese culture. Several talented children even got achievements in it. “I want to give our children more opportunities to experience new things and develop their interests,” Miss Mi said.

Huishi Primary School