An old and abandoned 20m high communications tower in the centre of Johannesburg has come back to a new look and the neighbourhood was cleaned up at the same time. The recently completed iThemba Tower, situated in Troyeville, Johannesburg, is made from an astonishing
7 000 recycled plastic bottles that were collected by local scholars and waste collectors. Each of them was filled with a ‘message in a bottle’ and a small light for illuminating the tower at night. This entire project was completed with the assistance of a team of waste collectors (Morena Lenong, Nana Lenka, Moses Tshabalala and Tokelo Mahale) and the local community. The tower took three years to be completed and is serving as living tribute to the work of collective action. Each bottle has a message. One message inside the bottle reads “I hope to be a doctor,” another “I hope we clean our world and protect our nature,”; yet another, “We all need a place we can call home; love, respect and protection is all we need in this planet.”