Making Things from Waste

1The last Saturday of the month

It is umuganda morning. Habimana is out with his neighbours, picking rubbish from the side of the road: bottles, tins, a squashed box.

He holds a clear plastic bottle up to the light and turns it slowly. Most people look at it and see rubbish. Habimana tilts his head and sees a pencil holder for his desk.

That is the whole skill in this lesson. Look at a thing and ask it: what else could you be?

2Useful, or beautiful?

Things you make out of waste come in two kinds.

• Useful things do a job. A pencil holder. A watering can. A little box to keep your beads in.
• Decorative things make a place or a person beautiful. A paper flower. A necklace. Bottle tops on a string that clink in the wind.

The best ones are both at once: a tin that holds your pencils and is painted with zigzags.

3The four questions to ask before you cut

1. What shape is it already? A bottle is a tube. A box is a little room. A bottle top is a circle. Do not fight the shape. Use it.
2. What could it become? Think of three ideas, not one, and choose the best.
3. What will I need? Scissors, glue, string, paint, tape.
4. Is it clean, and is it safe? Wash it. And if it once held medicine, paraffin or a chemical for the crops, put it straight back down.

Worked example: Habimana's pencil holder

1. Wash the bottle with water and soap. Let it dry completely. Glue and paint will not hold on a wet bottle, and roadside dirt can make you sick.
2. Mark the cutting line. Here is the trick. Wrap a strip of paper round the bottle, level, so the two ends meet exactly. Now draw along the top edge of the paper. Your line goes right round the bottle and it is straight. Draw it by eye instead and your pot comes out crooked and wobbly.
3. Cut along the line. This is the part where you call an adult. Plastic is stiff and scissors can slip.
4. Make the edge safe. A freshly cut edge is sharp. Fold a strip of tape over it, all the way round.
5. Decorate. Glue on strips of coloured paper, or wind string round and round the outside, or paint it.

Cost: 0 Frw. And one less bottle lying in the ditch.

Worked example: paper beads from an old magazine

1. Cut a long thin triangle from a page: two fingers wide at the bottom, coming to a sharp point at the top, and about as long as your hand.
2. Lay the wide end against a pencil and roll the paper around the pencil, tightly and straight, working towards the point.
3. When only the little point is left, smear glue on it and press it down flat.
4. Slide the bead off the pencil. Fat in the middle, thin at the ends: a proper bead.
5. Make twenty of them and thread them on a string. That is a necklace, and this morning it was rubbish.

Why start at the wide end? Because then layer piles on layer in the middle, so the bead grows fat exactly where a bead should be fat. And the thin point finishes on the outside, where one drop of glue holds it flat. Start at the point instead and the wide end wraps round last, sticking out like a little flag.

4More ideas to steal

• A bottle with small holes poked in its cap becomes a watering can for your bean seedlings. Holes in the cap, not in the bottom, so the water only comes out when you tip it.
• A cardboard box plus four bottle-top wheels is a car.
• Bottle tops shut inside a tin, with a stick for a handle, make a shaker to keep the beat.
• Old cloth wrapped round dry grass makes a doll.
• An egg box cut apart becomes flowers for the wall.

5Joining without glue

No glue in the house? Cut a slit in one piece of card and a slit in another, then slide the slits into each other. They lock together. Or punch two holes and tie the pieces with string.

Try it yourself

Say each answer out loud, then tap Show answer to check.

1. Umutoni finds a bottle in a ditch. What is the very first thing she does with it?
2. She wants to turn it into a watering can. Where should the holes go, and why?
3. Gatete draws his cutting line round a bottle by eye, and his pencil holder comes out crooked. What should he have done?
4. Is a necklace of paper beads useful or decorative? What about a pencil holder?
5. Mutesi finds a bottle that smells of paraffin. She says, "I will wash it three times and make a vase." What do you tell her?

Answers

1. Wash it with water and soap, and let it dry. Roadside rubbish is dirty, and nothing sticks to a dirty, wet bottle anyway.
2. In the cap. Then the water only comes out when she tips it over her plants. Holes in the bottom would leak all the way from the tap to the garden.
3. Wrapped a strip of paper round the bottle so the two ends met, then drawn along its edge. The paper gives him a straight line all the way round.
4. The necklace is decorative: it makes you look nice but does no job. The pencil holder is useful: it does a job. Paint the holder and it becomes both.
5. No. Put it down. Paraffin, medicine and farm chemicals leave something behind even after washing. Choose a bottle that only ever held water or juice.