Thank you guys for taking an interest in our area here. I've been here over 50 years same
house I grew up in and it's nice to see some of the community taking an interest in the place again
and we go up and down and get good and bad but we all have to remember we all live here together.
My name is Nea, I'm Bayla Don Vita and this is our Going Green Living Bling workshop.
Myself with my husband Eta Vita, we teach this workshop every summer and throughout the school
year here in Denver, Colorado. We are also here with Pick Up America, awesome organization who
is building a beautiful bench, bottle brick bench here at our garden. Yeah, we're excited.
Very excited. And this is the third bottle brick bench that Pick Up America has been
affiliated with so far and what a bottle brick bench is is a bench built using natural materials,
natural building and then using 20 ounce plastic bottles stuffed with filmy plastic
debris as a fill material within the bench. In the entire United States there's only been
seven bottle brick benches built so this is like y'all are like pioneers, you're innovators,
you're making a difference right here by helping build this bench. The bench starts with the base
about 12 inches deep of a foundation of gravel and then on top of that you fill that with broken
up urbanite or old concrete slabs that gets laid on top of that and then we're using earth bags
which is basically sand bags filled with dirt and then compressed. They go on top of the urbanite
foundation and then the bottle bricks fill in behind where the back where you rest your back
up against the bench you fill that in. Then the whole bench is covered in something called cob
which is a mixture of sands clay and straw and the cob is a natural concrete and it's pretty
remarkable how easy building in this in this way is. It sounds complex but if you really get dirty
and start doing it it's easier than building a house or building a bench with carpentry work.
Was it a learning experience? Yeah it really is. Especially with the bottle bricks. I never
thought you could do something like that with the plastic bottle. I'll put it in there. There you go.
This stuff it down. It took me about I don't know maybe 10-15 minutes to fill this up
and yeah I might I might have to squeeze a little more in there. Just pack it down.
Good break. First break. Can you imagine if everyone took their garbage and just did this
and built things with it? That'd be pretty cool. We would live in a garbage playground.
That would be really cool. Especially because the kids would probably make the coolest stuff out
of the garbage I think. This litter this trash that we put inside of it is sort of a reconciliation
with the land for us. It's taking what was once you know on the ground being an eyesore being dirty
and turning it into something beautiful for the community to appreciate. It's taking what was
waste and turning it into treasure. I said I have so many liquor stores and I heard you know
got have access to lots of bottles and so they're just gonna put them to use you know so it's a
really good project we're working with our kids and the babies and the young babies and the elders
and the friends and the family and getting this intergenerational dialogue going you know. If you're
living in a neighborhood that's maybe not the prettiest and not the best it's really up to us so
we like to talk a lot about community engagement and getting out in your community and making it
what you want it to be. So this is beautiful and there's always trash everywhere. And then too
learning the indigenous practices that's another thing we touch upon in our class and our curriculum
and so this going back to that indigenous practice of using what is available and using natural things
and field structures so it ties in beautifully. We're so happy to be working with them and
having this project happen. All the work I saw the biggest tool I saw was a drum stick pushing
trash into a plastic bottle. All the rest was done with your hands. Man-made all come from your
mind not from a machine it just that's what it's supposed to be. Hours countless volunteer hours
went into this bench probably like a hundred and fifty two hundred hours of volunteer effort went
into building this bench. So it is a it's laborious it takes a lot of work to pull it together but
part of the process is just bringing people together to build this bench in their community.
And what I feel particularly excited very excited about this project in particular is they're going
to turn this whole space into a youth led marketplace. So this bench is going to be a landmark here
for people that are coming to see the marketplace and also sort of brand this space with music
and creative expression and zero waste and natural building and garden and it's just a beautiful
space for sustainable culture to flourish and grow from right here in the five pints.
