Last weekend, I got the rare opportunity to take part in something amazing.
A group from our agency trouped over to San Pablo to help build a bottle school. 

The school is the project of My Shelter Foundation and the social entrepreneur, Illac Diaz. The idea is to use Litro soda bottles filled with soil as a sustainable and cheap replacement for traditional cement blocks. I learned that a filled bottle is much stronger than a cement block and costs just 1 Peso, making bottle schools extremely affordable. The only glitch is that it’s quite labor intensive. So if you can, try and volunteer.


How to Build a Bottle School:  

Step 1: Gather bottles. A whole lot of bottles. Pepsi helped gather 7,000 to 8,000 needed for the classrooms. 

 Step 2. Find a place with a lot of dry dirt.

Step 3: Sift it so that there are no roots or rocks.

Step 4. Create a mixture of water, soil, and 3% cement. Put them inside bottles. Get dirty.

Step 5: Stop for yucky photo op. (Note: Mud feels strangely refreshing on hands.)

Step 6: Break for lunch at your nearest SM food court.

Step 7: Gather bottles that have been baked in the sun for 12 hours and start stacking it up with cement.

Step 8: Pose on finished wall. Don’t you just dig how the bottles add texture to the walls?

Tadah! You have a bottle school that will last up to three generations. Here's a photo of some kids that hung out with us the whole day. The kid in pink is a boy. Such a cutie.

Please don’t try this at home kids! Contact this expert first. It was his idea and I’m sure he’ll be glad to help you get started. He’s also cooking up another project worth looking at- Isang Litrong Liwanag uses plastic bottles as an alternative light source for homes. The magic is that it requires no electricity.