Take Your Top off! from Glenda Duarte on Vimeo. Music by The Donnas

‘ Take your top off ‘ video is part of the campaign produced during the MA Graphic Design project about recycling your plastic bottle tops and creating awareness about keeping the oceans clean.

Did you know that plastic tops can not be

recycled together with bottles?

Often millions of plastic bottle tops end up as litter and migrate into our rivers and oceans. Fish, Turtles, Birds and other marine creatures mistake them for food with tragic results. Ingestion of plastic can cause physical damage and blockage of the breathing and digestive system, leading to internal infections, starvation and death.

Plastic tops are made in different plastic from the bottles and when attached they can not be recycled.

Take your top off and help keep our oceans clean!

How many plastic tops do you see?

Video by Chris Jordan

Picture by Chris Jordan

‘These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.’ Midway Message from the Gyre

In the UK, straightforward recycling caps companies that I could find are:

• GHS Recycling Ltd

• Green Ant Plastic Recycling

Even so, some companies will only collect and recycle plastic tops from milk jugs (plastic type number 2 HDPE), while others will require 1 tonne (1000 Kgs) for free collections scheduled to coincide with other collections of bottle caps and general plastics in your area.

The good thing is that some of them can also offer schemes for a number of small collectors and the payment for the material will go to the charity of your choice.

Another company doing a recycling campaign in the US is Aveda.

Aveda founded a unique recycling program that creates new caps and containers out of 100 percent recycled caps. The breakthrough-recycling program helps to save marine life by reducing the number of caps littering beaches and oceans. “Every cap we prevent from becoming rubbish is one less piece of plastic in the mouth of a baby seal, penguin or turtle”, says Aveda.

Currently, it looks like the program accepts caps that are brought into Aveda stores or salons only. For programs involving schools, Aveda will supply special shipping labels so they can ship the caps for recycling.

In England it is a very different scenario. Although Aveda has a UK website that gives information about its salons and spas, it does not as yet provide any information about an existing tops collection or campaign here in the UK.

It is hard to understand why councils are not yet taking the initiative to contact these companies and inform local residents. Far more effective are blogs that gather a variety of interested people and which share useful links about recycling and give creative advice about how to reuse plastic tops. Information that can’t even be found in the main Recycling UK Guide which only states that they should be kept out of recycling bins!

Stickers

The be able to visually communicate the ‘take your top off’ message I made an intervention that involved place a number of small, medium and large sized stickers mostly on plastic drink bottles but also in recycling and non recycling bins, vending machines and on other food related products that had similar plastic tops. That was done in LCC College and in Tescos Brixton.

By the end of the intervention week, all leaflets available at the LCC cafeteria had been taken by students or local people and the small experimental recycling bins were already half full, meaning that some people were successfully taking their tops off!

LEAFLETS

The leaflets were designed as folded A4 with the same visuals on the cover and different illustrations and elements on the inside used to inform and reassure the campaign message. They were designed to be unfolded and to tell a different message each time they were unfolded further. During the intervention they were placed close to the mini recycling bins creating an interest from the surrounding audience who would sometimes read it and put it back or take it home.

LABELS

One type of label was designed and used to be placed in small or big recycling and non -recycling bins. They contained an illustration of a hand removing the tops and information about why and how you should recycle the tops. The labels used similar colours to the rest of the materials.

Posters

These two posters were used on the display that the Dorset Council does after the beach surveys.

These 3 posters were used as supporting materials to the rest of the campaign and to promote curiosity among the public. They were made into three different retro 30’s inspired illustrations and placed on the LCC college.

Plastic Tops are the new Butts!

Plastic bottle tops are quickly eclipsing cigarette butts as the number one item found on the world’s beaches.
The biggest concern right now is that many people have no idea what happens to plastic bottle tops, not even knowing that there is a problem at all.

During my project research about why plastic tops are not being recycled properly here is what I found:

• Very often, when a plastic bottle enters a recycling facility with its cap on, the top is chopped off and disposed of in landfills because most machinery is not able to process the small caps.
• Plastic caps and lids can jam processing equipment at recycling facilities, and the plastic containers with tops still on may not compact properly during the recycling process. They can also present a safety risk for recycling workers.
• Most plastic bottles are baled for transport and if they don’t crack when baled, the ones with tightly fastened lids can explode when the temperature increases.
• Plastic caps are made from a type of plastic called polypropylene. That’s normally with the three chasing arrows as the number five and letter PP underneath that. Plastic bottles, on the other hand, are usually made from a different kind of plastic called polyethylene terepthalate, or number one and PET. If processed together, these plastics would contaminate each other.

Another fact is that plastic bottles are usually made into hundreds of everyday products, being much more commercially valuable. They can be used for fleece jackets, carpeting, comforter fill, lumber for outdoor decking and more. And polypropylene, plastic bottle tops, can be made into things like garden rakes, brooms, and ice scrapers, usually sturdy things. So depending on where you live, councils may decide to collect the plastic materials based on whether there is a market for it or not.

Quite tough! But the good news is, if people get informed and in some way are made conscious of the need to ‘take their tops off’, there are companies out there willing to collect and recycle them.