Building With Basura

LENGUA-LANGUAGE: Spanish

Municipal rubbish dump...400m from the town's water supply

Name: Building With Basura

Community Group: COFETARN (Comisión de Fomento Económico, Turismo, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales)
Location: San Pedro, San Marcus Guatemala

Project Description:

Another rubbish dump, where the smoke from the incineration blows back into the town

COFETARN is a voluntary civil action group made up of workers, business men, artisans and farmers from San Pedro and the surrounding community. We first met with this group when they came to spend two days volunteering to help build an earthbag house at the Casa Del Nino (another project Seres works on). From these two days: filled with presentations, workshops, site tours and hard physical work preparing soil for the earthbag house, the collaboration developed. COFETARN invited Seres to come and visit them, and to share with them our ideas, knowledge and stories and to help explore some solutions for the pressing environmental challenges that their town faces.

In our first visit, we worked through two days of intensive sessions: visiting rubbish dumps, speaking with local workers and government representatives, and bearing witness to the environmental problems that were of such concern to the committee members. The concerns were all valid, and it was evident the passion and committment that this group had towards making some positive changes in their community that would look after both the people and the environment. Together, we worked through many different ideas – projects that focused on COFETARN’s key focus areas of Forest, Water and Waste, creating a short and long term plan that was as much about empowering the group to be able to make positive change as it was about the change itself.

Juan with his newly made eco-ladrillo

Seres is now working with COFETARN to help them to implement their first project: “Building with Basura”. The idea behind Building with Basura is to creatively use rubbish to take a message to the community about the waste and contamination issue that San Pedro has. COFETARN will work with local municipalities to identify a community that does not have access to a communal building for activities. This building will be built out of “eco-ladrillos” – bricks made from used plastic PET bottles filled with rubbish until they are hard like a brick. The building materials will be contributed by the community, as COFETARN and Seres work with the local schools and communities to get them helping to make the eco-ladrillos, at the same time spreading an important message about recycling and reusing rubbish and protecting the environment from contamination.

Corrina Grace (Seres) and Ivan Yoc (COFETARN) on the field visit in San Pedro

Our goal is that the community building will be a unique, open space that all of the community: students, musicians, clubs and other citizen groups, can use. Users of the community building will be encouraged to make a donation in exchange for the use of the space – that can be either financial or an eco-ladrillo.

In this way, we will begin to build up our sorage of eco-ladrillos, which will lead us onto the next project in store for COFETARN and the San Pedro community: constructing houses for families from the surrounding community that are too poor to have their own.

NEW!!! CHECK OUT THE LATEST PROJECT UPDATES:

September 2010