GreenAmmo is of the firm belief that children and the youth are the future of a greener and cleaner planet. Because students are highly enthusiastic and can be easily motivated to take positive actions against severe issues such as climate change and pollution problems, they are the soldiers to save what is left of this planet. Under the same vision, GreenAmmo has started mobilizing all educational institutions to actively take part in combatting the plastic pollution problem. Schools, colleges and educational institutions are givers of knowledge and are responsible for not only giving the students a bright future but also a healthier planet to live in. GreenAmmo believes that the vison of educational institutions is no different than ours. Therefore, we propose to include the activity of making bottle bricks as a part of the mandated subject “environmental education”. Since a part of the examination marking for the subject is internal, we suggest that five (5) marks is allotted at every examination (semester/terms) towards the activity of making bottle bricks for each and every student under the respective educational institution.
The purpose of including a subject like ‘environmental education’ is to give knowledge to every student about the importance of the ecosystem, ecology and natural habitat that provides us with all the necessary resources for us to survive. The objective of this knowledge can be further enhanced with hands on experience on activities such as waste collection, waste segregation, upcycling and recycling. This will allow the students to be mindful and truly understand the depth of the problem of environmental degradation. At the same time, it would also generate a habit and eventually bring about a lifestyle change towards sustainable living.
Bottle bricks are an essentially a form of tapping dead and non-recyclable plastic waste in plastic bottles (like PET bottles) using a complete manual process and using the end products as a replacement for clay bricks. Making bottle bricks is a simple activity and every student can make them with correct training. It supports segregation of plastic at source (like home and schools) thereby preventing the plastic from entering landfills or polluting the environment. Being simple and completely manual in nature, it neither requires any machineries nor does it generate any harmful emissions (smoke). With every student making 2 bottle bricks for every semester/term, around 800 grams (0.8kg) of dead plastic would be tapped by every student thereby reducing load off the landfills or ecosystem. For example, in a school of 100 students, having three semesters each year, almost 250 kg of dead and unrecyclable plastic would be tapped.
Very often there lies a confusion as to what is the end result of making a bottle brick. It is here where GreenAmmo utilizes its expertise of “bottlebrick construction”. We collaborate with educational institutions to go one step further and make a model construction within the premises using the very bottle bricks made by the students. Such a construction acts as a motivating factor for every student to never throw plastic as now they start valuing the dead plastic as a raw material for the development of their beloved school/college. Depending on the yearly collection, there are a number of constructions that can be done such as compounds, gallery, workstation, eco-friendly library, toilet, benches and so on. GreenAmmo always leaves the choice of construction to the administration for they know their requirement the best.
However, because construction with bottle brick requires physical space, labor and capital in unavoidable circumstances, if the institution is unable to make a construction, GreenAmmo procures the collected bottlebricks and upon the mitigation of transportation cost we use the bottlebricks for construction in our nearest located project site (like Goa, Assam, Meghalaya, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh). The name of the educational institution will be included in the signage of the construction as a mark of respect from GreenAmmo towards the institution’s participation in the act of ecological restoration.
