School Happenings

Plastic Fantastic! 

On Thursday the 10th of September, the Year 5 classes had an exciting visit from Bill Verhagen from Precious Plastic Melbourne!  Bill loves working with plastic and showed us how to turn yucky waste into awesome new items. He showed us a cool video about Dave Hakkens from Holland, who started a global movement by designing special recycling machines. Since school children cannot visit big recycling factories anymore, it was amazing that Bill brought his machines straight to us! 

We learned that plastic is super durable and never truly disappears. Instead, it breaks into tiny microplastics and nanoplastics that animals eat, and then we eat the animals, and that means we have tiny plastic particles inside us! Did you know that some parts of Australia recycle 30% to 40% of their plastic, but other parts only recycle 2%? This means that most of our plastic waste ends up in landfills, gets incinerated or leaks into the environment as pollution.

We also looked around our room at chairs and buckets to learn about recycling codes. See, the different numbers mean the plastics have different chemicals, so you can never mix them together! Australia is great at recycling Grade 1 plastics, but not with Grade 4 plastics. So we used Grade 4 plastic lids for our workshop because they are the easiest to melt, and you can safely recycle them over and over again!

Bill brought three cool machines for us to use: two motorised and one manual. First, we shredded milk bottle lids into tiny flakes! Next, the plastic was melted and pressed into moulds. We chose to make either a pen, a cup, a Jenga block or craft beads. Finally, we chopped off the rough edges. In total, we probably made about $500 worth of goods from just recycled plastic! So yes, Mr Verhagen, we’re taking you up on your offer to join the global recycling community, starting with our families and local councils. Look out, Hawthorn East — here come the Eco Warriors! 

Written by Daisy F (5A)