Amherst students raise pollution awareness with plastic bag mural

Waves of Change is a CBC series exploring the single-use plastic we're discarding, and why we need to clean up our act. You can be part of the community discussion by joining our Facebook group.

A plastic-bag recycling project by students at an Amherst, N.S., elementary school has produced a unique pieceof art.

The students, who attendSpring Street Academy, collected over 20,000 single-use plastic bags for the Plastic Bag Grab Challenge, a nation-wide initiative created by the Recycling Council of Ontario.

When the bags became too much to keep in classrooms, teachers asked to store them in the gymnasium.

Physical education teacherDaren White saw the bags and came up with an alternative idea for their use.

He recruited his students to sort and glue the bags onto a gym wall. The finished product? A mural of an ocean scene, about24 metres long and3 metres wide, complete with breaching orcas, a fisherman and a lighthouse.

"It's really cool," says Simon Buske, a Grade 6student who helped with the mural."It's just taking something that we don't really need and making it into a work of art."

White says he wants students to continue to think critically about how people use disposable plastics.

"Our leaders are in our schools now and we can change their thoughts now," he said.

Now that the school has collected so many bags, White says faculty and students are trying to figure out what to do with the rest of them.

"One of the little boys today in Grade 1said, 'Mr. White, we can make slippers and everybody can have plastic bag slippers, just pull them over your feet,'" he said. "They're thinking and I think that's the whole purpose."

A Facebook post White made about the mural has also yielded suggestions from community members. One woman suggested cutting the bags into strips and weaving them into reusable bags, place mats andcushions to put on hockey rink bleachers.

White says he hopes word will get out about Spring Street Academy's project and other schools will use similar strategies to reduce and reuse plastic waste as well.

• Read more stories from CBC's Waves of Change project
• Discuss how we can reduce plastic pollution in our Facebook group
• Have a story idea or feedback? Email us: wavesofchange@cbc.ca