Year 6 Plastics Incursion

This term in Inquiry, Year 6 students are focusing on the question, "How do our choices with chemical use impact the world around us?" To deepen their understanding of sustainable chemical use, we invited Precious Plastics to our school to conduct an incursion, focusing on recycling and repurposing plastics. Through the incursion, students learned that plastics recycling is quite simple and easy, however, companies choose not to do this as it is not profitable on a large scale. They then engaged in a hands-on experience, where they practised recycling plastic on a small scale, using machinery to shred bottle caps, funnel it into a machine to heat it up, before re-moulding it into pens, yoyos and Jenga blocks. This was quite a unique and engaging experience, with students leaving the lesson with the following key takeaway: Recyclying plastic is not rocket science, it's not that hard!

• Kris - "There are different levels of plastic. You can recycle them to create multiple things like yoyos, pens and chairs. I learned how to use the mold and actually do the recycling.
• Jennie - "Recycling plastic isn't hard, it isn't rocket science. Only 10% of the 1 billion type 5 plastics are recycled per year."
• Riaan - "Different types of plastics have different uses and results when you melt and forge them. Some cannot be reused because of the materials that are in it."
• Sarah - "Not a very high percentage of plastic is recycled. It is actually not that hard to recycle plastic, as we learned today."
• Madhav - "It is more expensive for companies to recycle plastic, so instead they just make it. They care more about profit."