Christ the King Catholic High School's impressive recycling scheme turning plastic bottles into decorations

Christ the King Catholic High School on Lawrence Avenue has this year installed new machines in the school that are able to transform plastic waste, such as plastic bottles, into creative art slabs which can be used for a variety of purposes.

Noticing how much plastic the school throws away each day, the Head of Creative Arts, Louisa Cornah, began to do some research online, and came across a company called CR Clark, one of the country’s largest plastic machine manufacturers.

CR Clark makes machines which are able to grind down plastic into grains, as well as machines that can then mould these grains into new shapes, and Louisa saw them as a potential way to solve Christ the King’s plastic waste problem.

Louisa said: “I put a bid together and went to the old head teacher to say, as all my year eights will tell you, by 2050, there'll be more plastic in the oceans than fish, and we don't recycle enough. As a school, we have to pay to have plastic removed, and no school, particularly under the current climate is going to pay for that.

"So I put this presentation together and said how brilliant would it be if the kids can actually see what you can do with plastic, rather than throwing it away, and instead of buying stuff to make things, let's use something that already exists. It's a way of building that socio-economic and ethical side into the design technology curriculum, because that's really what we need to be doing."

Louisa’s bid was successful, and with the funding provided from the school she was able to buy three machines: an RS 25 Shredder which she describes as “cheese-grater” for plastic; a sheet-press which acts as “an industrial panini maker”, flattening the grated plastic down into flat pannels; and an injection moulder, that can turn the sheets into shaped objects, such as key rings or earrings.

Louisa explained: “What happens is you shred the plastic, we dry it out on a tray, and it's got all the colours in it, you know from the celebrations boxes, heroes boxes, packaging labels, and then they go into the press and make these absolutely gorgeous sheets – every single one is individual, so it's bespoke. I've then pushed it into the curriculum, so we've done things like make posters and table mats, year elevens have made some of their projects using them, and my year nines are making lights out of the sheets of plastic. It's a very labour intensive job, but the sheets are just spectacular when they're actually made.

“I'm just trying to instil the importance of recycling things rather than always wanting new. Plastic is our biggest worry, because we don't recycle enough of it, we're running out of oil, so we can't make any more, and the world relies on it so heavily. We need to find better solutions, so if I can inspire the kids a little bit, we might get some James Dysons for the future, you never know!”