UNITED NATIONS, July 29 (Xinhua) -- The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has announced an innovative partnership to build a factory in Cote d'Ivoire to convert plastic waste into bricks for school construction, a UN spokesman said Monday.
The durable, low-cost bricks will be used to build much needed classrooms in the West African country.
Cote d'Ivoire needs 15,000 classrooms to meet the needs of children without a place to learn, said Farhan Haq, deputy spokesman for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. "With this innovative partnership, 500 classrooms for more than 25,000 children will be built in the coming two years."
"This factory will be at the cutting edge of smart, scalable solutions for some of the major education challenges that Africa's children and communities face," said UNICEF Executive Director Henrietta Fore in a press release.
UNICEF broke ground in May for the first-of-its-kind factory in Abidjan, the capital of Cote d'Ivoire, in partnership with Colombian social enterprise Conceptos Plasticos, Gbolayemi Lufadeju, a UNICEF spokeswoman in New York, told Xinhua. Construction of the factory is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
Once it is fully operational, the factory will recycle 9,600 tons of plastic waste a year, UNICEF said. Nine classrooms have been built in Gonzagueville, Divo and Toumodi using the easy-to-assemble plastic bricks made in Colombia, demonstrating the viability of the construction methods and materials.
In a related development, UN General Assembly President Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces tweeted congratulations to the UN Environment Programme and the UN staff based in Nairobi Kenya on joining a campaign against single-use plastics, her spokeswoman Monica Grayley said Monday.
Espinosa noted that through their support and action, the Nairobi UN headquarters is now single-use plastic free, joining the UN headquarters in New York in the campaign.
