In the tiny village of San Marcos on Lake Atitlan in the Guatemalan highlands there are houses built out of plastic bottles. Yes, those same awful water bottles, the scourge of environmentalists everywhere, have found new value because of a German woman who started out in fashion and ended up in garbage.
With International Women’s Day coming up on March 8, a day to celebrate the contributions of women around the world, I thought of Susana Heisse and how she’s made a surprising difference.

In this small lakeside village where Susana moved 10 years ago there are a lot of plastic bottles because there are many people who live here and visit who can’t drink the water. Even someone with a Northern California sensitivity to all things plastic is relieved to find a bottle of water waiting in the hotel room so you can brush your teeth or quench your thirst with something besides Coca Cola, Gallo beer or Chilean wine.

San Marcos and other small villages have no trash pick-up. There are no giant green trucks to go through neighborhoods once a week and pluck various bins of sorted garbage from the sidewalk. Plastic bottles end up being tossed into the magnificent lake or burned with other household waste. When Susana came to San Marcos she was horrified to see all that plastic going up in toxic smoke. Germans were savvy about recycling and household pollution long before most Americans.

Some still call her that “crazy gringa.”

So Susana started her own campaign which she calls Project Pura Vida (www.puravidaatitlan.org) to introduce the villagers on the difference between good garbage and bad garbage. She wrote a book about recycling and distributed it to villages all around the lake. And then she took on the piles of plastic bottles along with other discarded plastic in the form of candy wrappers and chip bags.
She did some research and discovered that plastic bottles, because they seemingly last forever, could be used as insulation in construction. She taught some of the townspeople to compact clean, dry plastic trash and put it into used plastic bottles to make what she calls “plastic bricks” and convinced a few local builders to try them.

Today in San Marcos you can see houses and fences and walls built from plastic bottles which are stuffed with plastic bags. Sometimes there’s a peek-hole in a wall so that you look in and marvel at all that plastic inside.
The bottles are stacked inside the wall like conventional insulation, sealed in place with chicken wire and then covered with cement. Susana says the walls are cheaper than those built with cement blocks. And they’re less rigid, too, in case of earthquakes which Guatemala has to worry about. When Hurricane Stan wiped out part of the town, a wall made out of plastic bottles survived.

Tall, curly-haired Susana in bright beaded earrings and gauzy skirt used to be a fashion designer in Germany. When she’s not mucking around with plastic she creates and sells necklaces and bracelets made from recycled jewelry.She told our visiting women studies group that when she moved to Guatemala she fell in love with its beauty. But she couldn’t enjoy it without helping to preserve it.

Some people still think her ideas are wild, she said, and call her “that crazy gringa.” But in a world looking for ways to save itself, Susana has devised her own style of stimulus package. Little kids bring her their old candy wrappers. She gives them a marble or another toy. Then she makes a brick.

Pura Vida photo with Susana Heisse at left

Tags: International_Women's_Day, Juicy_Tomatoes, Susana_Heisse, Susan_Swartz

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Environment, Healthy Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.