Butiru transform plastic bottles into water tank

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Butiru Christian Comprehensive Secondary School is turning heads on social media and beyond with its latest innovation — a water tank built using plastic bottles. The school in Manafawa district has 1,500 students.

Simon Masaba, the headteacher, said the sh2.8m project was launched on March 30.

Filling bottles with wet soil

Richard Kaboole, a teacher at the school, says the tank has a capacity of 10,000 litres.

Kaboole, who is also the patron of the environment club, says through the project, they have been able to reuse waste plastics that would have otherwise polluted the environment.

Filling bottles with wet soil

Butiru Christian Comprehensive SS is one of the schools in the Bugisu/Bukedi sub-region participating in the Green Schools Initiative campaign.

Kaboole said: “We started by collecting plastic waste bottles. We filled each of them with ordinary wet soil while hitting them to make them firm. Then we levelled the ground with some concrete and started building with the help of the school engineer.

Some of the bottles that were collected to make the tank

“We used 12 bags of cement and one trip of river sand. We left the tank to mature for three days and then plastered the inside. After one day, the tank was covered with a concrete lid, and the gutters connected to it from the roof of one of the buildings.

“The tap was fixed and within two weeks, the tank was ready for use by students. With the onset of the rains, the tank has enough water for use by both students and staff.”

Students and teachers constructing the water tank

What the tank looked like towards completion. A total of 12 bags of cement and one trip of river sand were used to construct it

Students washing their hands at the water tank