At last week’s Recycle Upcycle school’s session, we were joined by Holly Best who works for Keep Scotland Beautiful who is funding our project through the Climate Challenge Fund.

The kids at St. Pat’s really did us service by recalling exactly which bin should be used for different kinds of rubbish and what happens when we don’t recycle and waste ends up in landfill.

We then moved on to the activity used before with the previous classes, assessing how long different items take to disintegrate in landfill. Once again, the children were amazed at how long some of the items took, especially the glass bottle which can take forever. In a previous post about this activity, I had written that  we thought the items made out of natural resources took a shorter time to disintegrate than the ones that used man-made resources. However, this isn’t strictly true as the glass bottle, made of sand, takes the longest. Holly informed me that it’s much more likely to be the case, that items that have taken a lot of energy to produce e.g. the immense heat required to transform the sand into glass, take the longest to degrade. Vice versa, those that have taken the least amount of energy to be made e.g. the banana which grows using photosynthesis, energy straight from the sun, takes the quickest time to decompose.

After all the hard work, the children then made paper beads with the simple method of rolling long, thin triangles of paper. Once they had made their beads they threaded them onto string and wore them as bracelets and necklaces.

Next week we will have an update on making bottle top shakers and plastic bottle plant pots and bird feeders!