The Earthly Touch Foundation builds classrooms out of eco-bricks for a local social outreach project in Diepsloot. With a team of experienced designers and builders, Earthly Touch Foundation has created or had donations of more than 60 000 eco-bricks, which are 2 litre PET bottles stuffed with tightly compacted clean plastic, sweet wrappers and other material. These eco-bricks are used to construct robust, cheap and well-insulated classrooms, which are cool in summer and warm in winter. The Foundation constructed one pilot classroom at a church in Diepsloot, and is incorporating lessons from this building into the construction of another larger building. It is also training several other social projects from Diepsloot and Pretoria on how to construct eco-brick classrooms so that they too may replicate this concept.
Diana Musara, who co-founded Earthly Touch Foundation, believes that not only will this create a social good because of the innovative and much more environmentally-friendly and cost-effective buildings (which also use solar power), but it also takes plastic away from illegal dumps and landfills, and can sustain livelihoods. She explains that the project has incorporated local residents into a value chain in which they provide plastic that would otherwise have gone into informal dumps and landfills, in return for various forms of assistance: “We use eco-bricks as a form of currency now, as a sort of barter system. We give community members food, clothes and stationary in return for the plastic they bring us.”
It is much cheaper to build with eco-bricks, which means the project can invest the savings on bricks into the community in this way, while also providing a safe educational space for local youth on completion.
