Macartney Ewing
ePortfolio
SIT Jordan: Engineering and Design for Sustainable Environments
I spent June 9th - July 28th of 2019 in Amman, Jordan, on this study abroad program with the School of International Training. The program focused on human-centered design and technologies for sustainable water use, renewable energy, and organic farming. This program had a significant emphasis on water scarcity and how Jordan is handling the rapid influx of Syrian refugees that have over doubled their population in the past 5 years with still very limited natural resources.
With the female peers in my cohort, our team assessed the needs of a community organization and created an engineering design proposal to fill a need that they expressed to us.
The organization my team partnered with was Dibeen for Environmental Development (DIBEEN) located just outside of Jerash. This area of Jordan has some of the highest levels of rainfall annually. In most cities in Jordan, your water is provided once a week by government-controlled taps and held in a plastic tank with a capacity of 3 to 5 cubic meters. Families must ration their water supply throughout the week and supplement the supply or make due if they run out before their supply is replenished.
These tanks have a lifespan of about 10 years, and when they need to be replaced, get sent to landfills as there are no organized recycling programs in Jordan. Most people supplement their weekly water supply with water bottles for drinking so many, many water bottles are sent to landfills around Jordan annually.
In order to redirect landfill-bound water bottles and provide a low-cost supplemental water supply to families in the agricultural region of Jerash, we had the idea of creating a 'bottle brick' rainwater catchment cistern that is adaptable to the flat-roof water drainage pipes that are predicting on most homes in the area.
'Bottle bricks' are used water bottles packed with sand or dirt and used as normal bricks would. The water collected in these cisterns can either be filtered and chlorinate the drinking or be used for small scale agriculture. We provided DIBEEN with a comprehensive building guide with all of the construction guidelines, suggestions for cistern size based on surface area of the roof and annual rainfall, and calculations for how many bottles they would need based on the size of the cistern.
Knowing that community-driven initiatives like this are often left to the women in the community, and with the desire to ensure the construction process was dignified and reasonable, my two peers and I got to work and made our own 0.5 square meter prototype on our school campus. Pictures detailing the construction process have been included below.
