Encouraging children to recycle
Good Caps has a focus on recycling lids and caps
Twelve schools have collected more than 2.8 tonnes of plastic and metal lids and caps as part of Good Caps — a pilot recycling initiative to stop valuable items from going to landfill.
Good Caps is an initiative supported by New Zealand business owners committed to sustainability and educating children about the importance of waste recovery and the circular economy.
As a part of the Good Caps programme, the 12 schools competed against each other to collect the most bottle caps.
With the pilot completed, Good Caps has announced the competition winners who collected the most lids and caps.
Students at Haumoana School came out on top, collecting the most caps, closely followed by St Mary’s Catholic School, who came in second.
Greenmeadows Primary School took out third place.
The top three schools have won a Nanogirl Live show, a fun, live science performance showing young people feats of science and engineering.
Sandy Botterill, chair of the Good Caps programme, says the pilot had been a success, with a significant quantity of lids and caps collected.
“The mahi of the schools, students and community have meant that we’ve captured 2.8 tonnes of lids and caps that were destined to be litter or go to the landfill and will now be recycled into other products,”
Botterill said.
Good Caps are doing more work to progress the programme, so more of the 5000 tonnes of recyclable lids and caps in landfills throughout New Zealand each year will be recycled.
While his school may not have taken out one of the top three spots, 8-year-old Havelock North Primary School student Jasper has been collecting caps to prevent them from going to landfill.
Jasper used the Good Caps programme to add fire to his personal
mission and get his classmates involved.
“I was at the environment centre one day and saw all the bins full of milk bottles, bread tags, metal lids, aluminium lids, and batteries,” Jasper said.
The young environmentalist was shocked, and started wondering about all the bottle caps in the landfill.
At the time Jasper started collecting caps, he was in his second year of primary school.
“My first year doing it [collecting
caps], I put one bag in every class and made a poster asking children to collect caps at home,” Jasper said.
This year, the 8-year-old made bins out of recyclable icecream containers.
“When I heard about the Good Caps programme, I wanted my school to support it.
“I started to go to cafe´s and restaurants to collect their caps; I think we should continue.”
The Good Caps team is now writing a report on their key learnings from this pilot for the Ministry for the Environment. The team is working on how to continue collecting lids and caps in Hawke’s Bay and possibly expand it to more collection points in the region. For the pilot, the plastic caps have been sent to Aotearoa NZ Made in Palmerston North and reprocessed to make new products such as recycling bins and plant pots.
The metal caps have gone to Hayes Metals in Auckland, and they have an offshore buyer for this material who will use it to create new products, such as car parts.
“As well as showing us what’s possible, the school children have been learning about the circular economy and that these lids and caps are not rubbish, but valuable commodities that can be used again,” Botterill said.
Any profits from the programme will go to the Kidney Kids charity through the Lions Clubs.