Our Crowdfunding Groups
Meet Our Team!
Hola! We are Team Costa Rica 2023-2024 for UT’s Projects with Underserved Communities (PUC)! PUC is a service learning-focused program with an initiative to bring students together in order to research, design, and assist with projects in underserved communities abroad. Our team consists of 7 members from the Cockrell School of Engineering and the College of Natural Sciences, and our goal is to design and construct a recycling center in Lorena Village, Costa Rica. We have partnered with a local Costa Rican nonprofit organization, Siempre Amigos, to fund and implement this community-led project in Lorena.
Top Row from Left to Right: Eesa Ansari, Carolina Ponce, Alberto Cortes
Bottom Row Left to Right: Zafra Haque, Daniela Cordon, Shreya Dheenan, Genesis Reyes-Petriz
Our Project
Next May, our team will be traveling from Austin, Texas to Lorena, Costa Rica where we will implement the recycling center.
(Recycling Center Example for our Project)
Currently, members of the Lorena community burn their trash or discard it in the river. As a way to mitigate the adverse environmental effects of these practices, the local primary school has taken the initiative to promote sustainability and educate their students on practical ways in which they can reduce, reuse, and recycle their trash. The kids are provided recycling bags from their local municipality to take home to their families, sort their recyclables, and return them back to the school. The monthly scheduled visits of the recycle trucks causes an overflow of the recyclable trash with no proper place of storage within the school courtyard. With the implementation of a recycling center, the Lorena community will be able to adopt more environmentally sustainable recycling practices and will have an established location to continuously store their recycling.
Our Partner
PUC teams have been successfully working with the NGO Siempre Amigos since 2019 to aid with various projects such as drainage, field lighting, and changing rooms for their local soccer field. 
(PUC Team Costa Rica 2022 in front of their project, a changing room, with NGO and Community members)
This non-profit organization has been serving in the Guanacaste province since 2011, with a mission to focus on the low-income region of Guanacaste. Partnering with Siempre Amigos allows us to stay in contact with the people of Lorena and address their specific needs/concerns. With our mutually beneficial partnership and the support of our advisors, we hope to make long lasting impacts in Lorena while learning and growing as culturally sensitive professionals in our fields.
Support Our Cause!
We’ve committed to raising 15,000 dollars! Your help and contribution of any amount will be essential and greatly appreciated for the success of our project. All donations will directly go towards the construction cost of the project. Other ways you can support is by spreading our message and following our journey through our social media linked below! Please consider donating today!
¡Gracias y Pura Vida!
25,000,000 plastic bottles are thrown away every hour, which is why we need to recycle!
There are 43,000 hectares of marine area in the Guanacaste Conservation Area.
80% of Costa Rica's total waste was found to be dumped within the ocean.
There are only 200 recycling collection centers in Costa Rica.
From 2015 to 2017, Costa Rica's recycling waste has increased by 469%.
Law number 9786 was passed in 2019 to combat plastic pollution by banning the sale or distribution of plastic bags by the supermarket and allow for the use of biodegradable bags.
Guanacaste Conservation Area is 147000 hectares, including land and sea
Out of the 11,000 tons of trash produced everyday in Costa Rica, about ⅓ is dumped in random places
