Zero waste and beyond

As the driving force behind Da Vinci High School’s recent “zero waste week,” senior Andre Almeida found a way to ensure that all garbage produced on the campus that wasn’t being composted or recycled still served a purpose other than sitting in a landfill.

Very soon, in fact, students will be sitting on that waste instead.

Taking a cue from folks at UC Davis, Almeida and classmates have been stuffing plastic bottles with unrecyclable plastic film waste, and those “bottle bricks” soon will take the form of a bench at the Da Vinci campus on East Eighth Street.

It was last spring, on Earth Day in fact, that Almeida helped build a bottle-brick bench at the Domes. The man behind that project — Brennan Blazer Bird — will help Almeida and company with the Da Vinci bench.