Plastic Panthers

   After some recent traveling, I found myself obsessed with my destination.  I was frequently looking up more hot spots in Bali, flight info, and planning a second trip.  I also started following companies/activity guides online to get ideas and stay current with my favorite little island.  I found myself pleasantly surprised with some of the innovative people and accounts I stumbled across.  Two of my favorite accounts were by brothers, Sam and Gary Bencheghib.  The brothers were concerned with the amount of trash/pollution coming from Indonesia, the country ranked 2nd in the world only behind China, and wanted to do something about it.  They created kayaks out of recycled materials, mostly plastic bottles, and set sail down the Citarum River in Indonesia.  This river is one of the most polluted rivers in the world and I'm sure after just a few minutes of research you'll find your stomach in knots over it.  Families continue to use this polluted river as a source of food, income, bathing, etc. although it is teeming with trash and pollutants.  The brothers documented their journey down the river and made several stops along the way which raised a ton of awareness and generated enough buzz to influence Indonesian lawmakers to step in.  I shared their inspiring story with my students and couldn't believe their response, they wanted to get involved somehow!

Here is Sam and Gary's instagram video that initially drew me in...

    I was proud that my students wanted to get involved and started brainstorming ideas.  Thankfully, with the help of my administrative team, we came up with a great plan of action!  My students were made aware of the plan and immediately got to work.  We started collecting plastic bottles to begin.  We would bring them from home, lunch, around the neighborhood (if they were laying around), and ask family members to donate theirs to us.  We started gathering them quickly and discussed that we didn't want to purchase just for the sake of collecting; however, we were still able to collect many in a short amount of time.  We've been collecting for the majority of the school year and have already collected over 800 plastic water bottles.  We wanted to get the school involved as well, so we created a PSA about plastic pollution, our activity, and how others could join in.  This took us some time, but we were all pleased and proud with the outcome which was shared with our school community.

Our plastic video...

The boys and girls surprisingly hadn't lost steam with this project.  Although our collection has slowed down, which is good, we wanted to move forward.  We began researching companies to host a reusable water bottle fundraiser.  Students found multiple companies, priced out options to analyze how much of a profit we'd make, and even created mock designs.  With all of that information, we could look into a refill station for our school for all students to refill their reusable bottles with filtered water in an easy way.  We're currently still working out the kinks on this step and are excited to carry it out and move forward and begin creating our sculpture garden!  We'll keep you posted on the next two steps of our journey!  If you're feeling inspired, start collecting and donate your bottles to our cause, or start your own sculpture garden!