Trash for Peace: Engaging Children, Youth and Community for a World without Waste

Kutner built agreement and participation by showing the school principal pictures of similar building projects, then co-presenting the project with the principal to teachers and parents. They then held trainings to teach the families and children on the proper techniques of bottle collection and stuffing them full of plastic or aluminium wrappers as insulation. They created visual handouts describing these methods and went to each classroom to present the information to the students, as well as to their parents at the next school meeting.

The trainers (Kutner and the teachers) used this opportunity to teach about the environment and nutrition by creating a lesson plan to teach about why they were doing the recycling. This lesson plan included the importance of not buying more soda in order to collect bottles, but, rather, to pick them up from the side of the road in order to clean up the town. They discussed how long it takes plastic bottles and other trash to decompose, and why burning trash is toxic and bad for health and the environment. In order to make these "trash" lessons fun, they would sometimes have "stuffing parties," including: singing songs; telling jokes; and putting on a trash fashion show.

Education, Environment

Once the construction began, the grades would rotate to put bottles in the wall for two hours in the mornings. Volunteers from US-based non-governmental organisation helped cement the walls.

"When evaluating this project after its completion, the teachers in the community as well as the mayor voiced that they felt that due to this project, Granados now has a greater sense of pride, an increased awareness of the ill-effects of trash and plastic specifically, and more ganas or desire to develop a long-term waste management system. In addition, this method of construction has spread all over the country." Subsequently, Kutner returned to the US and continued to make visible the need for recycling, for example, by making recycling barrels for a coffee shop out of its plastic cups. She and the Guatemalan principal from Granados demonstrated the building technique at the Smithsonian Folk Life Festival in Washington, DC, US.

This project also inspired Kutner to found the nonprofit organisation Trash for Peace (a 501c3 located in Portland, Oregon). There are many free resources on the Trash for Peace website for teachers interested in environmental education techniques.