DESCRIPTION
This is one of many community trashcans I designed and built when living in a village in Nicaragua. It serves to lower littering as well as trash-burning to keep the community cleaner and healthier. It is built solely with thick sticks, nails, and a “chicken bag”.
Sustainable Trashcan
PROCESS
While living in a rural village in Nicaragua through a program called “Amigos de Las Americas”, I wanted to find a way I could improve the community while I was there. I saw that there was no trash collection and people were constantly burning their trash. This was both bad for the environment and for the community’s health. I did some research to find that there was trash collection performed several times per year. The more trash that could be stored for those collections, the less would be burned. So I worked with community members to find common supplies to build these trashcans. They loved the idea and helped me build them all over the community.
LEARNINGS
In this project I learned how, with motivation and passion, you can make an idea a reality very quickly. It was also one of my first experiences designing and building something from scratch.
