Member Article

Yorkshire-based decking brand launches national recycling competition for schools

The UK’s largest brand of sustainable composite decking and cladding, Composite Prime, which is based in Ilkley, has launched its school recycling programme, ‘Message in a Bottle Top’.

The nation’s schools are being called upon to highlight the significant impact plastic waste has on the environment by collecting and transforming plastic bottle tops into life-sized art murals and sculptures. The winning school will receive a playground makeover worth £5,000 plus eco-friendly Composite Prime decking.

Composite Prime director, Charles Taylor commented: “With everything from giant jellyfish to a great white shark, the sculptures created by schools up and down the country were incredibly creative and showcased a huge amount of plastic waste. The response to the 2021 campaign was incredible, it saw 785 schools, 845 teachers, 110,432 children and 194,360 parents collect over 90,000 bottle tops.”

Built in line with the national curriculum and fulfilling learning objectives across art and design, science, maths and citizenship, the Message in a Bottle Top campaign also supports step 4 of the Ecoschools’ seven step programme. The initiative provides teachers and support staff with associated learning resources; including lesson plans, presentations, artist top tips and activity worksheets to complete in class and at home.

Charles continued: “Our Message in a Bottle Top campaign has been created specifically to target younger generations and Composite Prime is extremely proud to play a small part in educating the next generation about sustainability. We can’t wait to see the engagement with the campaign this year, and the incredible entries we’re hoping to receive.”

Working alongside We are Futures, who run The National Schools Partnership (NSP), the Message in a Bottle Top campaign is a cross curricular programme which inspires key stage one and two pupils to collect and repurpose their own bottle tops into thought-provoking art, showcasing the creatures they hope to protect from plastic pollution.

All competition entries submitted by schools, ahead of the deadline on 20 May 2022, will be independently judged by Composite Prime and the winning school will receive a playground makeover worth £5,000. The top ten schools will have the opportunity to showcase their artwork in an online exhibition and two runners up will receive tablets worth more than £100.

Charles Taylor added: “We want to demonstrate to children that there are a variety of creative ways to approach environmental sustainability. In the same way these fantastic sculptures are produced from plastic bottle tops, our products are produced from recycled materials; reducing the amount of plastic entering natural ecosystems along the way. We hope that schools across the country feel that the programme shares a very important environmental message with young people about wildlife and the effects plastic waste has on it.”

Composite Prime creates eco-friendly and socially responsible decking and cladding products, made using recycled plastic and FSC® certified oak wood flour. Each square metre of composite decking contains the equivalent of more than 3,000 plastic bottle caps or 280 plastic bottles. In the seven years of operation the brand has saved the equivalent of 176 million plastic milk bottles from landfill and over 1.8 billion bottle top caps.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Lucky North .