Barcelona has 4.5 million people in its metropolitan area that produce waste daily, we target one part of it: plastic bottles. The global annual amount of plastic used for bottled water is 2.7 million tones and most of the bottles end up in landfills. Each bottle requires nearly 5 times its volume in water to manufacture. This being said, our issue concerns the fact that we have citizens producing general waste that will be sent to a recycling plant. ECHO’s main aim is to remove this line of visibility in the process of recycling and reusing materials by reducing the distance between the citizens and the recycling process.

Our goal is to implement a healthy trend in Barcelona,  we would like for the citizens to be involved in the way they manage their waste by reusing it into different purposes in the leisure field. This trend would start in the neighborhood of Poblenou by reusing and recycling plastic bottles while it can also spread in other neighborhoods reusing and recycling other materials. In Poblenou, the plaça next to Escola Fluviá is an interesting location for the fact that it would give the project an educational factor that could affect also our young generations. We want kids to get involved in our project  to implement recycling/reusing in their daily lives, thus pushing their parents and families to do the same. For children, ECHO has created a game that can be played by using a  plastic bottle as a token. This way, ECHO will encourage children and therefore parents to save the bottles to play. The game is specifically designed for fun and education by using the character in different recycling processes as levels.

The idea is to create a pavilion that can evolve through time to give citizens the opportunity to input in the process of building. After building the armature, the citizens would input the plastic bottles in a random way in order to fill the facade of the pavilion. For this different components are needed for the physical prototype. The armature is made of wood and a wire mesh complemented by support components such as the bottles, the game and the app.

We have created a Facebook page for awareness, support and cooperation of Barcelona’s population and an app to boost the project’s popularity, allowing citizens to be informed of the different events and participate on surveys. They also have the possibility to create their own events or just browse the gathered data.

For the realization of ECHO, different people and agents are included to contribute to its realization. This impact is distributed into three types: the supporters, the participants and the investors. We believe that these three types of agents will enable us to realize this project with a positive impact on the community.

Echo is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at Master in City and Technology in 2015 by:

Students: Mayra López and Sherine Zein

Faculty: Marcella del Signore