A MOUNTAIN of bottle caps has formed on the University of South Australia Mount Gambier campus thanks to a largely school-based recycling initiative.
Sixteen Limestone Coast schools have donated over 112,000 bottle caps over the past five weeks, which will be recycled into plastic prosthetic limbs.
Project coordinator Michele Cranage hailed the project, which included a school competition, a success with the caps to be donated to Envision Hands for recycling.
“It was an amazing effort by all schools involved especially over a five-week period,” Ms Cranage said.
“I think it was a great community-minded initiative which was beneficial for landfill as well as the students.
“They were all full of questions and seeing a prosthetic arm it made it real for them.”
Ms Cranage said schools seemed to be engaged with the project.
“A lot of students specifically wanted to know how many bottle caps they needed to collect to make a limb,” she said.
“From research we discovered around 500 bottle caps were required for a hand and around 1000 for an arm.
“We could potentially make around 112 or more arms on our own which is amazing.”
Ms Cranage said the concept was “riding a wave” of support.
“As we were collecting, more and more people became eager and interested to become involved,” she said.
“The schools competition certainly surpassed anything we could imagine.”
Ms Cranage said the campus took it one step further and added a social media competition for a person to guess the closest total weight of the bottle caps.
“It is an Australia-wide initiative which has just gone nuts,” Ms Cranage said.
“Now it is not just us, we have had other businesses tell us they have began collecting bottle caps themselves too.
“It seemed the perfect circle for us which made a difference.”
Ms Cranage said the bottle caps would be packed by the end of the week to then be shipped to Envision Hands.
“I assume the company would be inundated with billions of bottle caps now,” she said.
“They would also have to sort through them and make sure the caps are the right type.
“It could be a while before we see our specific bottle caps made into prosthetic limbs.”
The schools competition closed late last week and winners will be announced early next week.
