Amherst students raise pollution awareness with plastic bag mural
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Students at Spring Street Academy in Amherst, Nova Scotia raise awareness with a plastic bag mural as part of the 2019 Plastic Bag Grab challenge. The mural contains 20,000 discarded single-use bags that will be recycled into composite lumber and decking.
Summary
A plastic-bag recycling project by students at an Amherst, N.S., elementary school has produced a unique piece of art.
The students, who attend Spring Street Academy, collected over 20,000 single-use plastic bags for the Plastic Bag Grab Challenge, a nation-wide initiative created by the Recycling Council of Ontario.
When the bags became too much to keep in classrooms, teachers asked to store them in the gymnasium.
Physical education teacher Daren White saw the bags and came up with an alternative idea for their use.
He recruited his students to sort and glue the bags onto a gym wall. The finished product? A mural of an ocean scene, about 24 metres long and 3 metres wide, complete with breaching orcas, a fisherman and a lighthouse.
“It’s really cool,” says Simon Buske, a Grade 6 student who helped with the mural. “It’s just taking something that we don’t really need and making it into a work of art.”
White says he wants students to continue to think critically about how people use disposable plastics.
“Our leaders are in our schools now and we can change their thoughts now,” he said.
