by Hello! We are Corliss (right) and Jen (left) and we are embarking on this journey of learning more about plastic upcycling. We both enjoy making crafts and are interested in helping the environment. We are really excited to see what we will learn in our upcoming sessions!
Station 1: Cutting the edges of the plastic + SortingĀ
At the first station, we were tasked to cut the plastic wrappers up so they were flat without those trippy edges. It was pretty chill as it simply involved a pair of scissors and the plastics, like cutting paper. However, there was one problem to it: as the plastics were donated and unwashed, there were remnants of food left in some corners of the wrappers and oily plastics. It was something we tried to ignore as we did not want to think of how long the food had been there. But even though this was greasy and gross, some of the coffee packets did smell amazing (like bubble tea!) which we found amusing and brightened up our day. š
Station 2: Washing and Drying the Plastic
We had to wash the plastic to remove any oiliness or remnants of crumbs or powder for the food packaging. This was a rather tedious process as we had to ensure that the plastic was completely clean so that it could be used to make crafts. Some pieces of plastic were extremely oily and even after multiple rounds of washing, they would fail to pass the quality check. This was really frustrating for us and this made the process of washing slow and tiring. After we finished one batch of plastic, we split the work with one person working on drying the washed plastic and the other continuing with drying of the plastic.
Station 3: Cutting the plasticsĀ
This station was our favourite! It was really satisfying to see the stack of cut plastic getting higher over time. We used a cutting board and pen knife to cut the plastic according to a template. We had to be extra careful to ensure that the strip was long enough so it could be used for the crafts later on. We bundled up the cut plastic into sets of 10 by design. We tried really hard to dig through the bags of plastic packaging to find those of the same design so we could make a set of 10!
Station 4: Folding the cut plastics into the stripsĀ
We had to fold the pieces of plastics in half twice to form a long strip. With the long strip, we put it through the template and stapled it, to form our strips! This was used to make the arts and crafts needed to be sold at the Christmas event. It was quite fun and easy to accomplish, compared to the other stations. While we were doing this, we could also chit chat and catch up with each other since this did not require as much focus as the other stations. This definitely made for a great end to our day! š
Overall, this was a very fun and fulfilling experience and we got to understand the tedious process that goes towards creating each craft. We feel pretty good about our experience today as we got to finish so much in the short time frame of 3 hours. We are so excited to see what the strips that we prepared this week can be used to make!
Look out for our next blogpost: Upcycling workshop!