Poor, urban areas in developing countries can be very dark places, as houses are often crowded together and roofs must be water tight to keep out the rains. Resource learns about a new project that’s bringing light (and a bit of resource efficiency) to the Philippines

“I love to recycle”, a smiling Illac Diaz told the assembled crowd at TEDx Dubai late last year. Diaz took to the stage to explain how his MyShelter Foundation is encouraging a low-cost green revolution in the Philippines. “We all know why we have to recycle. Something that we consume for a few minutes – an hour maybe – takes a long time to get rid of... This especially in a country such as ours, which is an archipelago, 7,100 islands. When the plastics and the bottles come into the islands, there’s very few reasons for it to go out, so either they bury it or sometimes they just put it out into the sea and it just floats away.”

Diaz’s small NGO started looking at ways to change the world in a big way with very little money. The financial constraints led Diaz to look in some unusual places and eventually he realised that “a great big problem could be the biggest solution”. So, Diaz and his colleagues “got all the bottles we could out of the junkyards” and started putting them to good use. Initial projects to build schools out of plastic bottles filled with soil have led on to a project with the aim of changing “everything for people that are living in darkness”. And so the ‘Isang Litron Liwanag’ (A Litre of Light) project was born.