UVa students in Mongolia try to build greenhouse out of Soviet-era vodka bottles

It is often said that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

For a team of University of Virginia students and their Tibetan and Mongolian partners, discarded Soviet-era vodka bottles have become the beginnings of a greenhouse in central Asia.

The group of students spent a month in Mongolia, a landlocked nation with a population of about 3 million, from May to June last summer using recycled materials to build a structure to improve the area’s agricultural practices.

“[The project] came out of the Development on the Ground course,” said Robert Swap, a research associate professor in UVa’s Department of Environmental Sciences. The course requires students to undertake group projects to practice developing a proposal to meet an expressed need.

Representatives from M-CAM, a local international-development firm, told Swap about a resort, called Hasu Shivert, built on a former Soviet-era spa and surrounded by decades worth of discarded glass alcohol bottles.

“Is it possible to make use of these things that are in abundance that most people consider waste?” Swap asked his class to consider.

The students, headed by Sarah Culver, a fourth-year anthropology and environmental thought and practice double major, put together a mock funding proposal as part of an assignment for Swap’s class. Together with M-CAM, the students finalized their programs and successfully applied for a Jefferson Public Citizens grant that totaled nearly $30,000. Culver applied for and received a separate, individual grant from the Institute for Practical Ethics totaling $2,500.

Because Mongolia is so cold, it has a short growing season. The students and their partners intended the construction of a greenhouse to extend the area’s abbreviated growing season.

Swap said that he met with the students weekly throughout the fall semester to plan and organize their trip, but once the students landed in Mongolia they were on their own.

The group was made up of Culver, fourth-year architecture student Carlin Tacey, fourth-year global development studies and history double major Claire Cororaton and graduate civil and environmental engineering student R.D. Smith. At Hasu Shivert, the group met Toshi Dekyid, a student from Tibet who had studied at UVa and participated in Swap’s course the previous year. They worked alongside representatives from M-CAM, as well as partners from Tibet and the Mongolian Academy of Science.

The team landed in Mongolia without a specific plan or design in mind.

“From the start, we wanted it to be collaborative,” Tacey said. She said that she and her fellow students had hoped to work closely with the community, as well as their foreign partners, to find a design and solution most appropriate to Hasu Shivert.

It was important to the students to use as much recycled and repurposed materials as possible in the construction of the greenhouse, Culver said.

“We’d been warned about the vodka bottles, and were thinking about how to use clear glass,” she said. Drinking vodka is more ritualized in Mongolia than it is in the United States, she said, and so the area surrounding the resort was quite full of discarded bottles.

“They’re bottles that were built up or accrued over Soviet occupation. There isn’t much to do in Mongolia other than drink,” Swap joked. “Their stuff tends to build up over time.”

The students were less prepared for beer bottles and other types of glass they found on the premises, and struggled with repurposing those materials. Using beetle-eaten or discarded wood proved troublesome, as well. Picking nails out of waste wood was “ridiculously time consuming,” Culver said.

Ultimately, the final project didn’t turn out quite as the group had planned.

“It was a structure, but it didn’t really work as a greenhouse,” Smith said. Building the structure was difficult because of the given materials, and also because of the general lack of construction experience among group members, Tacey agreed.

“Over the course of the year, we came from concept to building a structure,” Culver said, indicating that the project was too involved and time consuming for the amount of time they had to implement it.

“We came into the project thinking we’d have a lot of people from the community to work with, but that didn’t exactly work out,” Cororaton said. Because of the lack of community engagement, the students were not able to complete the structure. Instead, they are depending on their partners at the Mongolian Academy of Science, who have not had the time to return to Hasu Shivert as yet, to finish the project.

Though the actual construction of the project did not go according to plan, the team members still feel they accomplished and learned a lot in their time in Mongolia.

“I think there have been a lot of levels of good that came out of [the project],” Culver said. The students were able to experience first-hand the difficulties of implementing a project from start to finish, as well as working with international partners with conflicting ideas and interests.

“We were the initial relationship builders,” Tacey said of the group’s collaboration with Mongolian workers.

“These are not long-term, established relationships by any means,” Culver agreed, but noted that the possibility for future collaboration is an option now, thanks to the students’ work on the greenhouse. In particular, Culver was pleased at the working relationship formed between the Tibetan and Mongolian workers, who she thinks may be able to work together on other projects in the future.

Moreover, Culver said that she and her classmates have “laid the foundation” for future academic exchange work.

The group is now working alongside other recipients of the Jefferson Public Citizens grant who have served either abroad or in America. Each group works together to submit an article for publication in the Jefferson Public Citizens Journal, but Culver’s group has its sights set on other, further publications.

“A lot of our power and the takeaway we are getting is from our collaboration with these other groups,” Tacey said. “It’s a really ‘real’ experience to have as an undergrad.”