Vision

Our vision was to reduce the amount of plastic that students in our school were throwing in the garbage. We partnered with our pre-existing recycling program to collect HDPE bottlecaps from bottled drinks to repurpose and recycle them into new forms.

Action

Taking inspiration from Seaside Reclaimed (a local enterprise in St. John’s), and Brothers Make (YouTubers who work with HDPE plastic), we decided that we would start up our own enterprise making good out of recycled HDPE plastic.
While our school process beverage container recycling, the caps were just being thrown out , and we felt like we could do an awesome project with them to help the environment and also have a pretty fun time!
We took on this project because we felt this was a common item that was being thrown out in our school and we wanted to remove it from our contributions to the landfills.
We started out by watching some videos on how to recycle HDPE plastic and brainstormed some ideas about what we would like to make as our enterprise project. A few more students joined our group as word of mouth spread, and we ended up with about ten students in the school directly involved in the project.
We sorted the bottlecaps by colour (a larger feat than we had anticipated) and then used laundry bags to wash them all in the washing machine at school (cold water only, of course.)
We also began another bottlecap collection, making it a competition between the different “Houses” in our school. We put out collection boxes in our main lobby and students contributed bottle caps for months on end.
As we collected more caps, we also started melting. This was a huge learning curve for all of us as we experimented with the different ways to melt the plastic and determined what was the most efficient and effective way to do so. Many lunch times were spent “melting” and experimenting with our melted plastic. We first employed an old paper shredder to shred our plastic caps and then ultimately decided as a team to invest our grant money into an actual bottlecap shredder.

Reflection & Celebration

We ran into a ton of issues and it was wonderful to brainstorm and work together to figure out how to resolve them. While this was an environmentally-based activity, it was also an exercise in problem-solving, cooperation, and engineering.
Ultimately, we began to be able to make our projects. We had decided that our first project would be a coaster set and bought molds accordingly. Our plan was to make some sets and give them to the teachers as gifts.

We have completed a few prototypes and continue to improve our methods and procedures. While this is as far as we have made it this year, we cannot wait to continue this project in years to come and continue to remove waste from the landfills while turning it into purposeful and environmentally sustainable items.