LILY Harar is the world’s first public library built from recycled plastic — a gate to imagination, learning, and dignity, raised from 27,000 kg of the city’s own waste.
Harar has stood for a thousand years behind five historic gates. With LILY, it feels like the city opened a sixth — this one for children.
The library’s walls are built from hard-to-recycle plastic collected by more than 600 waste collectors across Harar. Together they mobilized 27,000 kg of plastic waste, helping avoid over 7,000 kg of CO₂ emissions — waste that once buried the city, now holding up a place where its children learn.
LILY was inaugurated alongside Ethiopia’s Deputy Prime Minister and the leadership of Harari region, and funded by a partner honoring his mother’s legacy of education. But the real story is dignity: for the collectors whose work made it possible, and for a partner city that turned what it threw away into something timeless.
More than a building, LILY is proof of what Kubik builds toward everywhere we work — that the end of the waste stream can be the foundation of civic life.
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