Meet the builders making schools from plastic waste

The idea was simple yet profound. What if you could use the plastic waste littering your home country to help solve its housing crisis? For architect Oscar Andrés Méndez and his business partner, electronics engineer Isabel Cristina Gámez, that inspiration led to an invention that embodies their core values.  

Their Colombia-based company, Conceptos Plásticos, transforms plastic, including bags, snack-food containers, and shampoo bottles, into a modular building system of bricks and columns. The Lego-like blocks are made of about 95 percent plastic; builders only need to supply a roof and windows. Since launching their company in 2010 in Bogotá, the team has refined their concept to be increasingly efficient. A typical two-bedroom house with a bathroom, living room, dining room, and kitchen now captures some six tons of plastic and can be built in about five days at a cost anywhere from $4,000 to $7,000—far cheaper than traditional construction. 

The structures are also earthquake resistant, fire repellent, well insulated, and not so easy to discard: Each building, Méndez says, should stand for more than 200 years. And the concept reflects several goals at once. “I am more of an environmentalist, and Cristina, she likes to take care of people,” says Méndez.    

Initially, Conceptos Plásticos partnered with private companies and an NGO to build houses and schools in Colombia—about 50 so far. In 2017 Aboubacar Kampo, a doctor then serving as the representative for UNICEF in Côte d’Ivoire, contacted Méndez and Gámez to explain how plastic waste clogging sewer systems there contributed to water stagnation and the spread of malaria. Côte d’Ivoire faced a shortage of schools, and many rural communities’ existing ones, made of mud bricks, needed frequent rebuilding during the rainy season. He invited Méndez and Gámez to the nation’s most populous city, Abidjan, where they were moved by the sight of women carrying children on their backs while picking plastic from dumps for meager pay.  

“We have the solution,” Méndez remembers thinking. Not only with their brick-making technology but with the potential to create an economic system that, as Gámez puts it, could “empower the people.” Conceptos Plásticos had the technology. They just needed to share it.  

As part of a three-million-dollar deal with UNICEF, Conceptos Plásticos built a new factory in Abidjan and recruited workers, mainly women, to source the plastic needed. So far, over 4,000 tons of plastic have been transformed into more than 550 classrooms, all for approximately 60 percent of what traditional construction methods cost. The effort has created a circular economy that removes waste from the environment, improves the educational system by way of well-designed buildings, and creates jobs. 

Méndez and Gámez are now negotiating on a similar school project in Ethiopia and investigating how to build latrines in refugee camps in South Sudan. To share their technology in places where building new factories may present challenges, the partners recently designed a scaled-down version of their system that can be transported in a 40-foot container. It may run on trash, but as Kampo puts it, “the concept is not just beautiful but brilliant.”