The Peace Corps program will feature the work of former Peace Corps volunteer Laura Kutner, who built a schoolhouse in Granados, Guatemala, using discarded drink bottles and trash that once littered the community. Ms. Kutner rallied the agricultural community of 900 and surrounding mountain villages to collect more than 4,000 used plastic drink bottles from ditches, gutters, and trash piles. The drink bottles were stuffed with plastic bags to give them greater heft, then tied together with chicken wire and plastered with a cement mix to build two new school rooms.

Find out more about this excellent recycling project and come meet Ms. Kutner and her colleagues from Guatemala at the 2011 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

Van Luong is the festival blogger for the 2011 Folklife Festival.