Ecuador

Solution: Turning plastic bottles into thatched roofs

Image: reuseeverything.org

Image: reuseeverything.org

The previous post, “The ghosts of our consumption,” illustrates the scourge of plastic on sea life. Could plastic thatch roofs be a solution?

Betsy Teutsch writing in The Atlantic:

“David Saiia, a professor of strategic management and sustainability at Duquesne University, has come up with a brilliant alternative: plastic thatch from the huge amount of discarded plastic.”
“Saiia specializes in developing business solutions that will help people out of poverty while preserving habitats. On one of his many trips taking university students to the Ecuadoran nature preserve, Maqui Picuna, he challenged them to think of something useful to do with all the plastic bottles littering this scenic Andes cloud forest. Saiia’s sculpture, painting, and drawing skills kicked in; shortly a proverbial back-of-the-envelope drawing launched his business transforming bottles into thatch strips. The tops and bottoms are sliced off; the remaining body of the bottle is flattened and then cut into strips. (Saiia and Carnegie Mellon’s Engineers without Borders are now tweaking a human-powered machine to do this work.) Next, the strips are adhered to a cross-strip using ultrasonic sealing machines provided by Dukane. If you’ve ever sliced yourself wrestling with a device encased in clam-shell plastic, you know how effective ultrasonic sealing is.”

Replacing traditional thatch roofs with corrugated tin roofs creates homes trap heat and produce deafening noise when it rains. Plastic thatch roofs are a quieter, longer lasting solution.

Sources

The Idea of an Ecovillage

Post by John Michael

Teepee and Cotopaxi: A teepee, which is part of the housing at Comuna de Rhiannon, sits in the foreground, while volcano Cotopaxi looms behind.

There are many opportunities to create systems that work from the elements and technologies that exist. Perhaps we should do nothing else for the next century but apply our knowledge. We already know how to build, maintain, and inhabit sustainable systems. Every essential problem is solved, but in the everyday life of people this is hardly apparent.

Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual by Bill Mollison

I’ve heard a lot about sustainability, and I know that it’s a good thing, but I’ve rarely seen it in practice, and never to the extent that it’s practiced here, at Comuna de Rhiannon, a farming commune located within the Andes Mountains, and about an hour to the north of the Ecuadorian capital of Quito. Sustainability is the operating idea at Comuna de Rhiannon, and it governs the fate of everything that lives within the commune’s boundaries, from the hogs that are used to till Rhiannon’s soil, which is rich in volcanic ash, as the farm is surrounded by several volcanoes, to the food that is leftover from meals, which is either used as animal feed or as compost, depending upon what it is. Sustainability is such an integral part of the culture at Comuna de Rhiannon that on my third day here I found myself being teased by two young British men, who were residents of the commune at the time, because I had double-spaced my texts before printing them, and because I did not print on both sides of a sheet of paper. “That’s not at all sustainable, John,” chided Will. “No, absolutely not,” agreed Rob, who punctuated his statement by shaking his head in tongue-in-cheek disappointment. But, instead of reacting with annoyance, as I tend to do when I’m teased, I was pleasantly intrigued by the exchange, because it was the first time that I’d ever been teased about my sustainability. In fact, it was the first time that I’d ever heard of anyone being teased about their sustainability, and I began to wonder whether the culture of sustainability on display at Comuna de Rhiannon was a sign of the things to come in both Western Culture and, perhaps, Global Culture at large.

Anecdotal Evidence of Climate Change and Ecosystem Decline in South America

Post by John Michael

As a traveler, I often find myself engaged in small talk, and no topic is more frequently the subject of conversation between myself and those that I meet while traveling on the road than the weather. Yesterday I was riding in a truck up the side of one of the three volcanoes that surround the Ecuadorian city of Otavalo, which is located within the country’s northern highlands. I began to speak with my driver about the rash of tornadoes that had just ravaged the American South. He told me what a shame it was that so many people had died, and then he went on to say something that I found very interesting. “It never used to rain this much in Ecuador,” he admitted. “Sure, it would rain every now and then, but never every day like it does now.” He gestured toward the overhanging gray clouds and at the rain that was spattering the windshield. “Before, we would hear about things like what happened in your country, and they were things that only happened in other countries. But now, with these rains, people are dying here, too.” “People have died because of the rains?” I asked him. “Yes,” he nodded, momentarily turning from the road to look me in the eyes. “Thirteen people have died recently from floods and landslides.” He looked back at the road. “And it’s worse, because now, with all of this rain, the crops are beginning to rot before they can be harvested.” I stared out the window at the hilly fields of corn that we passed. “We used to be so happy,” he continued, “because Ecuador was a paradise, but now things are changing.” Five minutes after he had said these words, the rain turned to hail, and we had to pull off to the side of the road and wait until the storm had calmed before continuing on our journey.