Massive Ornamental Rock Donation.
Firstly, a huge thank you to Cllrs Tom & Ken (local stonemason) Hughes for the amazing brawn and ingenuity in transporting a half ton ornamental rock kindly donated by Val and Chris (Maghull residents). We really thought it was going to be immovable but incredibly, even after finishing a hard days work today, they moved it this evening to be a striking feature behind Rainbow the recycling rhinoceros. Further thanks are due to Ken and Tom for cutting back the overgrown vegetation at the close by Dell last week, making the internal path and external pavement accessible, and the walls and trees free of damaging Ivy.
Amazing Up-Cycling & Recycling of Rhinoceros Bottle Tops
Secondly, you may know that the rhinoceros was intended to highlight endangered wildlife and to remind people of the importance of plastic recycling by virtue of being filled with plastic bottle tops. Originally, when the rhinoceros was full of bottle tops we were going to seal the rhinoceros and leave it as a ecology statement but were persuaded by the community keep it open and either recycle or up-cycle the bottle tops. Initially recycling places were a challenge to find but we were able to give varying amounts between 50,000 (a half full rhinoceros) to 100,000 to be up-cycled into beautiful mosaic art works to Art departments at local schools and colleges. Their work is nearly completed and will hopefully be displayed as public art on Stafford Moreton Way (potential examples are pictured)
Some of the potential plastic bottle top mosaics
However, we have now discovered an amazing new school on the Wirral who have practically made an enjoyable science out of recycling plastic bottle. Patrick Link, colleagues and students at Neston high school have created almost industrial classroom machinery to recycle 100,000 of our donated bottle tops. Once the bottle tops have been cleaned and sorted into the correct plastics and colours, they have a machine that shreds them, another machine to melt them and a final machine that moulds them into sheets that can be cut out creatively or placed into shaped moulds. The children really enjoy the creative process and outcome and have made spinning tops, combs, plant pots and much more. They have displayed them at craft and science events and have been nominated for a national award. Every batch has a beautifully unique colour which they give a specific name and when asked what name we would like for the Maghull batch we could not use rainbow after the rhinoceros because it was already in use, so we plumped for Iris which has a tragic but uplifting meaning for the philanthropic rhino sculptor. So many thanks for your clean plastic bottle top donations, and hopefully it won’t be too long before we see the community artwork in Maghull.
Noticeboard
Finally, the last component of the Stafford Moreton Way crowd funded project (1) will be the installation of a ecology noticeboard, which we are currently getting estimates for and will be situated close to Rainbow.
PS. Of course what we should be aiming for is reducing the production of single-use plastic by half by 2025. Please see the link for more info: https://champnews.com/story.asp?id=GN4_ART_2000793…
(1) www.spacehive.com/stafford-moreton
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