1. Foundry Lane Primary School Earth Summit Competition Inspired by artist Griffith Aaron Baker ‘The Raft of the Doldrums’ And the WASTEBUSTER Video How Plastic Bottles and Caps are Recycled

2. Who will build the sculpture? Everyone has to be over 10 years old… Year 6 have SAT tests to revise for… Some year 5 children will not be 10 years old… Only three of our Eco-Council will be 10. Chose Year 5 children who are or have been Eco-Councillors in the past and are 10 years old… 7 children match this criteria – Sorted!

3. First we had to decide what scale to do this work on…. Bottles – too big, nowhere to store them or keep sculpture while in the making. Smaller bottles – people may not send in the right sort… Just lids – but what to use for the round ‘container’? Sweetie pot - Sorted!

4. Collection options? Everyone to send in lids! – We may get far too many and not have anywhere to store them! Just Year 5 children to collect lids – we may still get too many and all milk lids or many of similar colours Staff – give directive on staff notice board and collect with pupils asking staff directly for support – Sorted!

5. So we have the resources, we have the children and we have booked in the time…. How will we get it to look the same or even similar? Work at a station with the laptop and pictures of Griffiths’ artwork. Group 1 Work Fix and support the back of the sweet box to make sure it stays upright.

6. Working Progress…

7. Assembly message… Take the lid off! for better recycling! To reuse as a games counter! To reuse as a toy stacking game! … for so many other things!

8. During the week, some damage occurred and we had to make remedial repairs before continuing… Further work made a huge impact though….

9. Having decided to fix the sculpture to a base, which kept getting bigger and bigger… … We finally had a piece of work we could all be extremely proud of!

10. So just imagine… If all these plastic lids belong to plastic bottles, how many bottles went to recycling? How many would have gone with lids? Can the lids be recycled? Unlike the plant in the USA, shown in the video on WASTEBUSTER, our recycling collections do not take lids and if a bottle has a lid on it, it gets rejected. Our sculpture raises awareness of this problem and reminds people to remove the lids of bottles before placing in the recycling waste!