Shropshire Star

Shropshire students show the bottle to recycle

Shropshire students have found a monster way to raise awareness of recycling.

Published
Dropping the last few tops into the gorilla are Kemarra Mills and Lucy Jones both aged 13..

Pupils at the Thomas Adams School in Wem, their families and friends have been saving their plastic bottle tops to pop inside a huge, gorilla shaped mesh cage.

They joined forces with the British Ironwork Centre, and came up with the idea of a gorilla sculpture to raise awareness of plastics.

Members of the school Eco Club visited the centre near Oswestry recently to help make the mesh cage and watch it taking shape. In just a few weeks the gorilla is almost full.

Teacher Maxine Turner said the children's imagination had been fired by the idea of using household waste to created art.

Kemarra Mills and Lucy Jones

"The community has also had its imagination fired and we have had hundreds of bottle tops donated to us," she said.

Once the gorilla is full the students say they will used the tops for a second piece of art.

"They want to make a mural using the different colours of the tops," she said.

"It is interesting that there are many more green tops than the others, which shows that more people seem to drink semi-skimmed milk."

Inspired

Chairman of the Ironwork Centre, Clive Knowles, said: "The school’s environmental club approached us to discuss their project ideas and challenged us to create something inspiring for their bottle tops.

"Completely inspired by their environmental ideas, we chose to create a metal mesh mountain gorilla which has been designed to hold over 100,000 bottle tops and will become the integral base for their bottle top sculpture. One of the world’s most endangered species, the mountain gorilla is the perfect symbol to help raise awareness for the protection of our environment and its species, and we can’t wait to see the finished project later in the year.

"When they visited the students helped our in-house blacksmith to complete the gorilla by welding the final few pieces together. "

The centre won national fame for the gorilla it made for Uri Gellar, constructed from spoons.