awards and recognitions

Grade 8 kids from the Justice Cecilia Munoz Palma High School in Payatas, Quezon City have come up with an alternative and unique way to build sidewalks and wall barriers.

The secondary students from a school named after one of the country’s foremost Supreme Court Chief Justices have found a way to transform dog feces into a mixture for making bricks. Their ambition to clear the city’s streets of the animal’s poo and potentially creating an alternative to bring down the cost of a key construction material.

The process of the research project begins with the students gathering air-dried dog feces. This is then mixed with cement powder and molded into rectangular “bio bricks.”

As simple as it seems, the teenagers say their “bio bricks” are ideal for sidewalk pavements or small structures like backyard walls.

Each brick contains 10 grams of dog poo and 10 grams of cement powder and has a faint odor that the group says will fade with time.

“Our streets will really be cleaned up,” Mark Acebuche, the students’ science class adviser told the Reuters News Agency.

Mark hopes the local government and corporations would sponsor the students’ research to help upgrade production.

Filipino high school student projects have received international recognition, more recently among them, a noise pollution control sound absorption device developed by Angeles City High School cited by the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Arizona and a solar-powered micro-farm proposed by Muntinlupa National High School which won the Zayed Sustainability Prize at the United Arab Emirates.