When Charlie Woolstencroft volunteered to help bring the vision of a small Canberra charity to life, he had no idea what he was getting into.
“I’m an electrician by trade, I’ve been an electrician for 52 years. I’m not a furniture designer, I’m not a carpenter, this goes beyond anything I’ve ever done,” he said.
But after months of hard work and a few mistakes along the way, Woolstencroft created the first of many fully recyclable and ecologically sustainable benches, made entirely from bottle caps.
“It takes away their anxiety”
The project is the brainchild of Tim Miller, the founder of the Lids4Kids charity, who started collecting recycled bottle caps in 2019, initially to create plastic hands and arms for child amputees.
Recently, Mr Miller focused on a new use for plastic: seats for Canberra schools, known as Buddy Benches, designed to help students make friends or have a place to sit to reduce anxiety.
The process, which takes about 20 hours in total, begins with melting the granules of the bottle cap into “lots and lots of different colors.”
The benches, made from recycled plastic lids by the Lids4Kids charity, are brightly colored and textured. (ABC News)
“I charge the machine, it can be one color, it can be two colors, depending on what we decide to do,” Woolstencroft said.
“If it’s just a slat, it’ll take about 30 minutes or so. Then, after that, it’s the work: cutting it all out and screwing it all together.”
Each bank is made from around 15,000 plastic caps, ranging from milk bottle caps to water bottle caps and soda caps, which are non-toxic.
Banks can be made completely smooth, but Mr. Miller and Mr. Woolstencroft decided to leave them textured.
“It’s actually a tactile thing that kids can feel, it takes away their anxiety, it’s a lot like a gym, it calms them down,” Miller said.
“They can imagine, ‘Maybe that looks like snake skin or crocodile skin,’ or ‘that looks like a fossil in there.’
Latest project for the Canberra charity, which ‘went viral’ three years ago
Space for play or pause, M for mute, left and right arrows for search, up and down arrows for volume. Listening duration: 6 minutes 48 seconds 6m Lid4Kids founder Tim Miller says he was determined to find a use for the small plastic lids that can’t be recycled. (ABC News)
The success of Miller’s original creative idea to recycle plastic milk bottles into limbs for disabled children surprised him in 2019, when it “went viral” and attracted thousands of messages.
Miller said she had to empty the donation bins, set up outside her Canberra home, three times a day.
The response was so overwhelming, he had to call a halt to donations after the Melbourne-based maker of the artificial limbs stopped taking lids as it reduced its stock.
But Miller was determined to find a use for the small plastic lids, which can’t be recycled, and decided to make them into seats for children in need.
Today, Lids4Kids still receives around 50,000 donated lids each week, and Miller now plans to “install a bench in every early childhood facility in Canberra”.
This week the first bank was delivered to Aranda Primary School, who have been collecting caps themselves for the charity since it was founded in 2019.
Aranda Primary School’s Buddy Bench, featuring the school colors of red and black. (ABC News: Emma Thompson)
Assistant headteacher Lisa Kingham said “the children loved being involved in the process, they talk about it, they value it”.
The bench has been placed in the library, made with the Aranda Primary colors of black and red.
“We intend to use it as a kindness bench, and it will be great for the kids when the yard gets a bit busy, they can come in and use it as a quiet space,” Ms Kingham said.
Miller said he hoped Canberra schools would continue to collect lids and eventually be able to make their own benches or other “plasticwork” projects using the same process, incorporated as part of the STEM program.
“They can literally do it as part of their science program,” he said.