Five Words

“Hey Elector, it sticks to the wall.” Elector was giving a test to several students on bathroom plumbing. He paused and looked up.

“Really?” A small grin emerged from his often-doubtful looking face. He quickly realized the large scale potential of those five words.

Who would have thought when you threw fifty beer and wine bottles into a concrete mixer with a few cobblestones for an hour it would produce smooth glass particles, safe to touch, that cuts the amount of sand you need to make stucco… in half.

I returned to the wall outside the practical lab and smiled to myself. The small patch of stuccoed wall glistened in the sunlight – a fine selling point to aesthetically pleased Capeverdeans.

Inside the practical lab at the technical school in Assomada, several other students, teachers and I are running makeshift tests to determine the relative strength of glass as an alternative to rock and sand, the typical concrete aggregate used in Cape Verde. Given the smooth composition of the glass, the initial tests have shown glass, even when finely ground, doesn’t adhere to the concrete as well as rock and sand. This means that if you were to use purely glass aggregate instead of rock and sand around a concrete pillar, it would lessen the load bearing capacity. It would crack.

However, despite the crushed glass’s success in load bearing tests, the fact that it sticks to the wall means several things:

First, Cape Verde has no shortage of empty beer and wine bottles. So anything cheap and simple to reuse glass would be worth investigating. It might give a little relief to the landfills and street gutters. Second, if this project were to be increased to a community-wide recycling program, it would create jobs. Nothing revolutionary, but something where there was nothing before. Thirdly, there is a major sand problem in Cape Verde. In the middle of the night, women notoriously steal black sand from their own beaches to sell to construction companies. A lessened need for sand might drive those midnight sand hoarders into a new profession. Of course, it might not. But it’s worth a try. The only question is where to start.