Classrooms Made From Plastic Waste
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast — She left home before dawn. Her four children were still asleep in her cement block house in Abobo, a maze of shops and houses. She and a friend crossed into the upscale neighborhood of Angré and tossed plastic castoffs into bags slung over their shoulders.
Mariam Coulibaly is part of a legion of women in Abidjan who make their living picking up plastic waste and selling it for recycling. Now they are lead players in a project that turns trash into plastic bricks to build schools across the country.
They are working with a Colombian company to convert plastic waste into an asset that will help women earn a decent living while cleaning up the environment and improving education. “We don’t get good prices” from the current buyers, Ms. Coulibaly said. “This will help us.”
In the past year, the venture has
Loucoumane Coulibaly contributed reporting. built nine demonstration classrooms. The first schools were built with bricks imported from Colombia. But in the coming months, a factory now rising in Abidjan will begin making the bricks.
The project was the idea of Aboubacar Kampo, who recently ended a term as the Ivory Coast’s representative for UNICEF. He recruited Conceptos Plásticos, a recycling company with a mission of building housing and creating jobs for poor people.
The new plastic-brick classrooms are badly needed. Some classrooms now pack in 90 students, according to the country’s education minister. Conceptos Plásticos has a contract with UNICEF to deliver 528 classrooms for about 26,400 students, at 50 students per classroom.
Until this year, children in the village of Sakassou went to school in a mud-brick and wood building. The mud brick eroded in the sun and rain.
But the three new plastic classrooms could last practically forever. The interlocking bricks look like black and gray Legos. They are fire retardant and stay cool in hot weather.
The project would be impossible without the organizing skills of Ms. Coulibaly, president of a 200-strong women’s community association called “The Fighting Women.”
The country’s official minimum wage is roughly $25 per week, though many people earn far less. The women collecting plastic say they earn $8.50 to $17 a week.
When they start selling to the factory, they may be able to double or triple their income, the company says. That’s because the factory will buy types of plastic, like snack packaging, that the women cannot sell now.
The project has the blessing of Kandia Camara, Ivory Coast’s outspoken education minister, who says it can only lift women up.
“For us, it’s not a humiliating profession,” Ms. Camara said. “It is a job organized for them, their financial autonomy, their dignity, family, society, and their contribution to the development of the country.”