Diepsloot Eco-brick project!

We’ve been helping with some amazing projects as far away as South Africa, thanks to our partnership with the Jane Goodall Institute. Back in October we raised money for a Jane Goodall South Africa project in a township called Diepsloot. We recently had an update and are so excited to see the impact of our community fundraising has had!

Diepsloot is an informal and very poor township in Johannesburg, where 350,000 people live well below the poverty line. We are happy that our fundraising has been able to help some of the families and children who live there.

With the money we raised, the Earthly Touch Foundation and the Jane Goodall Institute have made over 30 garden beds with eco-brick walls (which are bricks made from plastic bottles!) and planted crops like kale, spinach, beetroot and butternut squash to feed some of the families who live there. We also paid for a water tank to be installed to keep the vegetables growing.

They are also running workshops for the children who live in the township so that they can do Roots & Shoots projects of their own!

Not only that, they also built this brand-new nursery school using the eco-brick making tools we funded! Doesn’t it look amazing? You can see they have painted the ends of the bottles in bright colours… who knew that rubbish could look so stylish!? The green room you can see at the end of the block has been named Solihull!

In total, over 55,000 eco-bricks including 3,500 sand-filled ones were used in both projects. That’s more than 28 tonnes of plastic repurposed and saved from landfill or incineration!

The township children now, for the first time, have a nursery school where children can learn, grow, and thrive. It just shows how working together to help others can make a difference!