Benson Li hin Cheung, Huang Anqi, Jashleen Kaur Bhandal, Ron Tay Hao Qian, Tan Yew Mei Nysha
Academic Advisor: Ms. Sadaf Ansari
With a rapid increase in population and consumerism, an unprecedented volume of plastic waste is entering our landfills and oceans. According to the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF, 2018), Singapore discards 700 million kilograms of plastic each year and less than 10% of it is recycled. Given a forecasted global production volume of 583.3 billion plastic bottles in 2021 (Statista, 2017), besides having an efficient recycling process, Singaporeans need to have a prudent mindset in using plastic.
Consumer habits need to change from the ground up and our project aims to shift opinion on the use of single-use PET bottles by engaging the student community in a work-with-plastics workshop. In preparation, we explored several different methods of constructing furniture out of used plastic bottles such as heating and fusing the bottles together with a hot gun, glue gun, heated grill etc. However, safety concerns like burns and toxic fumes ruled out heat based options. We finally chose a simple adhesive medium for ease of participants.
During the workshop, we educated participants on the 7 grades of recyclable plastic while making stools out of PET bottles. We measured the effectiveness of our workshop by conducting pre and post workshop surveys. Our results indicated that direct engagement in re-purposing used plastic bottles had a significant and meaningful impact on participants’ perception of the problem of plastic waste, and their individual contribtion to the global problem. We will explore a collaboration with OES to conduct such workshops for the NUS community.
Keywords: Waste, Responsible Consumption, Plastics