This article takes a unique view of urban resources, and challenges the idea of sending waste “away”. The references to building materials is based on the opinion of local builders and the writer’s experience.
This project is located in: Köppen–Geiger Zone Cwb, ICC Climate Zone (SIM) 2c, in an area with 499 Heating Degree Days and 1342 Cooling Degree Days.
When many people hear the phrase “natural building”, they imagine building with materials like earth, stone, straw, wood, or clay. They think of using materials found in nature around us to create living structures to house our communities in a style that reflects the local climate while taking into account the environmental impact of human life on the Earth. In our current world, we have more than just natural materials around us. We have concrete and its reusable remains called urbanite. The global use of cars and trucks leaves behind billions of discarded tires, hundreds of millions in the U.S. alone, that end up in landfills and the countryside. Industrial logging and tree processing creates paper that once read (or not, in the case of junk mail) is discarded. The advent of plastics that allowed for great medical advances, the increased shelf life of goods, and a multitude of other consumer products has left the globe with piles of plastics buried in the ground, floating in the ocean, and blowing around landscapes. These materials are now a part of the natural environment around us.
Surrounded by so many synthetic building materials and systems, one can easily forget that what we are to understand as waste has many potential second uses. If we expand our idea of natural building to a broader “ecological building” we could use whatever is around us to construct our environment.
Both natural and human-made materials are available in Comalapa, Guatemala. San Juan Comalapa is situated in the central highlands of the department of Chimaltenango at 2,150 meters (about 7,052 feet) above sea level near a steep ravine or what the native Mayan Kaqchikel people call ‘Chixot’, meaning ‘on the edge of a frying pan’. The pitching hills and mountains of conifer forest and intermittent small farming plots contain a brilliant color palette for the hundreds of Mayan artists that reside in Comalapa. The farmed hillsides are dotted with adobe homes and walls that the native people here have made for centuries. The total population of Comalapa is about 41,000; 98% of them are Mayan Kaqchikel. The community engages in farming, artistry of many kinds, and has a surviving traditional culture measured in customs, textiles, and stories. In a landscape such as this there is little available space for a landfill and ravines are plentiful. There is a large ravine just blocks away from the town square where one may drive right up to the edge of a hundred foot drop over a gathering mound of trash mostly consisting of plastics and tires. This is where most of the town’s trash ends up when it’s not scattered in the streets and washed into storm drains and out into the creeks and rivers below. After observing this relationship with human-made refuse, a non-profit called Long Way Home began in 2004 with a strategy to bring locals together to learn about eco-friendly living, appropriate sustainable technologies, and improved waste management solutions.
Cavities between tires are filled with extra ecoladrillos (left). The tire, bottle, and concrete walls under construction (right).
By creating and maintaining a community park in town, Long Way Home was able to launch an educational organic terraced garden, tree nursery, and trash bottle program. Trash bottle bricks or ecoladrillos are made by stuffing inorganic rubbish into plastic beverage bottles. To pay for the costs of maintaining a community park, an equivalent 25 cent entrance fee is charged to the public which can be paid with one ecoladrillo. The reaction of the youth to this program has been overwhelming with over 28,000 bottles collected in less than four years! These ecoladrillos are then inspected for proper stuffing and incorporated into one of the dozens of buildings at Centro Educativo Técnico Chixot, an environmental and ecological education school. The project aims to foster a new group of Guatemalan students, environmentalists, and entrepreneurs uniquely equipped to innovate in the field of sustainable construction. Construction on Centro Educativo Técnico Chixot, an elementary, middle and vocational school complex, began in 2008 on the land of Paxn just a half a mile from the city center of Comalapa. The 18 main buildings are built mostly of rammed earth/trash tires, glass bottles, ecoladrillos, aluminum cans, cob, earth and lime plasters, and bamboo. Concrete and rebar, the cheapest and most available building materials in the area, are incorporated for strength and seismic resistance.
Looking inside of one of the classrooms called aulas.
Rammed earth tires account for most of the structural volume of the construction of Técnico Chixot. Tires are free and populous over much of Guatemala; they are cast into used tire yards or on roadsides and ravines where they gather water and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes carrying Malaria and Dengue Fever. When pounded with a sledge hammer with moist soil and coarse gravel, tires make reliable retaining and load bearing walls. Each course of tires is alternated to make an interlocking brick stack pattern (also called a running bond). Often rebar is pounded between courses and at tire columns for greater resistance to earthquakes and tremors, which are quite common in this mountainous region. Each tire can take more than 45 minutes to compact properly and can be mixed with non-biodegradable refuse that is too large to fit through an opening in a plastic bottle. Through this method additional tons of trash have been sequestered on site and because the materials are cheap or free, more funding can go to local employees. By the beginning of 2017, Long Way Home had built over 14,000 tires into the school buildings and property. There is now hardly a tire in Comalapa and the crew must drive about 45 minutes to the nearby city of Chimaltenango on the Interamerican Highway, where there are many pinchazos (tire changing shops) that willingly donate their used tires. There are so many tires that, beyond retaining and structure walls, rainwater cisterns have been made to meet the expected needs of the entire school divided into two main tanks of 4,000 and 42,500 gallons. The larger tank is made from numerous courses of full size commercial semi-truck tires each over three feet in diameter.
Bottle bricks provide daylighting in a computer lab (left). Tires form a dramatic retaining wall and staircase (center). Bottle brick wall offers colorful lighting in the upstairs office (right).
The application of trash bottle bricks or ecoladrillos is widespread throughout the Centro Educativo Técnico Chixot. The ecoladrillo can serve the function of both insulation and light structure block depending upon the density of trash compacted into each bottle. When firmly compacted, they fill the curved cavities between tires, sometimes in groups of four or more bottles, to reduce the thickness of cob or cement that must cover the tires to make smooth walls and prevent tire breakdown by solar radiation. They also reduce the amount of cement required for the arched concrete roofs of many of the buildings on site and offer some insulation between the outer and inner layers of the roofs. Ecoladrillos can be used in great numbers and effect when paired in walls with bamboo framing members. In Comalapa, there are forests of soft and hard woods which produce small amounts of lumber, so to preserve this forest ecology Long Way Home chooses to source nearby construction grade bamboo for many of their projects. When properly cured bamboo can last for years and be easily incorporated into natural and ecological building styles. It can also be its own form for concrete and rebar reinforcement when the internodes are punched through with rebar and filled with a fine concrete slurry; in this way the bamboo maintains its outward aesthetic while adding some hidden strength. The aula, or primary school classrooms, are built in this way. Another opportune match can be found when using bottles, bamboo, and plaster to make a framed plaster panel. Orient the bottles vertically and sandwich them between wire or natural mesh framed in bamboo culms that are slightly larger in diameter than the bottles. Since the frame is slightly larger than the bottle infill, plaster can cover the bottles fully and leave the bamboo exposed on edges and corners. This kind of panel was used on the school’s composting toilet walls.
An educational mural explains humanure compost system.
The tradition of lime plastered structures in Guatemala has remained intact for millennia. Limestone deposits are abundant in the mountainous regions and a variety of slaked lime quality can be found. After months soaking mixed with sand in a barrel, lime plaster is applied to most of the exteriors of the school buildings. These plasters often end up very thick, in some places a few inches thick, to smooth out the undulations created by the circumference of the rammed earth tires. Earthen sculptural plasters, some covered in colored lime finishes, adorn most of the exteriors and some interiors of Técnico Chixot displaying hieroglyphs, natural scenery, environmental education, and geography. Lime plasters are also used on many of the interiors as well because of the durability, acoustics, and bright color. In Central America glass bottles are more often reused than recycled, so bottles are thicker and heavier and do not break nearly as easily as recyclable glass containers. These thick bottles still chip and wear from repeated use and bumpy truck rides across mountainous countryside, after which they are discarded. These slightly blemished bottles offer a beautiful and cheap way to reduce electricity demands by encouraging daylighting into spaces and beautifying them with splashes of washed color while providing security. Oriented horizontally or vertically depending upon the thickness of the ceiling or wall, glass bottle bricks at Técnico Chixot form whole light wall mosaics and sparkle the domed ceilings like stars onto the students below. Over 7,400 glass bottles have been implemented on the campus, providing daylighting to almost every room.
A water cistern is framed by rammed earth tires.
The grand opening of the Centro Educativo Técnico Chixot campus in San Juan Comalapa was celebrated on Saturday, February 11, 2017. After eight years of building the school with over 400 tons of trash, they opened with 130 students from preschool-9th grade and expect to grow to around 350 students to fill the campus. Even though the Centro Educativo Técnico Chixot is built, Long Way Home will have opportunities to sequester trash as more community spaces and human dwellings are built. Long Way Home is committed to ecological building:
The social and environmental benefits of building with waste are numerous and long-term. Environmental decontamination leads to both restored ecological integrity and improved human health. Ridding the landscape of litter adds to its aesthetic and recreational value, beneficial both to Guatemala’s tourism industry as well as to the local population. This is a low-cost development strategy, appropriate and affordable for rural, low-income residents. The avoided costs of a low-impact building technique imply reduced reliance on renewable resources and reduced emissions associated with production and transport of high energy-consuming standard materials. Furthermore, as 60% of total building expenses go towards labor costs, this economic strategy is an investment in the local population and a multiplier effect that promises to benefit impoverished rural communities. Instead of funneling as much money into cement production and logging operations, the productive reuse of locally-sourced waste materials and onsite dirt in construction creates jobs and limits out-migration of at-risk youth. Even though resources like tires and plastic bottles may not be the first thing that comes to mind with natural building, they have been used successfully in natural building systems. Fabricated materials can be cleaned from our surrounding lands and seas, where they are now degrading our environments, and instead sequestered into structures as part of ecological building. With ecological building, the designer acknowledges that humans can play an integral, beneficial role in improving and sustaining the health and vitality of their local ecology
The primary school classrooms, aulas, and library.
Myles Danforth is a licensed contractor in California with over a decade of hands-on experience in alternative building. He has practiced permaculture and alternative building in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Oregon, and California. He now partners with the talented natural builder Amanda Fischer to run Healthy Home Artisans, a design/build/renovation firm with the goal of creating systems of alternative ecological construction for the benefit and access of all people. For more information about Long Way Home or Centro Educativo Técnico Chixot please visit http://www.lwhome.org/ , or if inspired, feel free to donate to the cause.
