Bottle Recycling Project (UC Berkeley)

The UC Berkeley student chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) will partner with the Appropriate Technology Design Team (ATDT) of the San Francisco Professional chapter of EWB to develop a simple and scalable solution to the recycling and reusing of plastic bottles as building material. With the mission of empowering communities by providing tools that facilitate local economic development and provide basic needs, ATDT will work with the community in San Juayua/Juan de Dios, El Salvador to utilize discarded waste products, primarily plastic bottles, for non-structural construction materials. The project aims to design, create, test and deploy a manual recycling system to the community with instructions for local manufacture, operation, and maintenance. The community will benefit from both the reduction in the solid waste pollution and by introducing a new source of construction materials to insulate dwellings from rain, wind and heat.