Muirlands
Middle School
Club
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Changes due to Covid-19
During this pandemic, we cannot meet in person to work on what was our current project, which is explained below. However, we have started a climate awareness website which informs about current climate change facts, programs for saving endangered species, what you can do to reduce climate change, and more! Check it out here: https://sites.google.com/view/climate-awareness-page-usca.
Bottle caps - they're a trifle object, and most people don't think twice about using them. After a short span of use, bottlecaps are discarded and taken to landfills, even if they are recycled by the consumer. However, their lifespan on Earth is anything but short. Each of the billions of bottlecaps discarded annually sit in landfills, streets, or even worse, the ocean, for over 1000 years. That means that if you throw away a bottlecap today, you great-great-great-(insert 28 more "great's" here)-grandchildren will be the first of your descendants to be able to witness if fully decomposed. So what do we do with all this plastic?
One solution is to make a mural, like the one pictured above. Though the hard plastic in bottle caps makes them energy-intensive and expensive to recycle, they can be very easily reused. Club US is collecting the bottle caps used by students at Muirlands Middle School and repurposing them, forming them into a mural. Not only that, but the materials used to make this mural, resin and cardboard, are either discarded (cardboard) or eco-friendly (resin). Furthermore, most of our funds for this project come from the 5-cent refund from recycling cans and bottles, meaning that even more plastic avoids landfills because of this project.
The bottlecap collection bins we have stationed around our school have climate/social justice-related questions on them; depending on which bin participants put their bottlecaps into, participants can vote with their bottlecaps and show their opinion on the question. The question is reset every two weeks, and this unit's question is: "Reduce your carbon footprint by going vegan, vegetarian, or pescetarian OR use renewable energy sources?" So far, Club USCA has collected hundreds of bottlecaps at school.
If you go to Muirlands Middle school and have given a bottlecap, we thank you for your participation. Every bottlecap we prevent from going into the ocean makes it that much cleaner, and bit-by-bit saves the ecosystems of animals in and out of the water. Regardless of the differences between people, we all share the same planet, and we need to work together to fight climate change and pollution.
