6,000 Plastic Bottles + Some Dedicated Villagers = New
Schoolhouse in Guatemala  You'd never know it just from looking,
but the new bright orange schoolhouse in Granados, Guatemala has
walls built with used plastic bottles—and so much other plastic
waste that the team who built it had to go to neighboring
villages to collect waste because they used up all the trash in
their own.  Peace Corps volunteer Laura Kutner was inspired to
start the project because of the plastic trash that she noticed
everywhere in Guatemala, and because schools had classrooms with
no walls. So she borrowed the idea of using bottles as a
construction material from Pura Vida, and with materials and
labor from local businesses as well as help from Hug it Forward,
they set to work.  The team filled individual bottles with
plastic grocery bags, chip bags, and other waste they had
collected, and after placing the bottles inside metal fencing
(for shape), they used trash again to fill spaces between the
fencing and the bottles. We needed A