HANCEVILLE, Ala.- Students from Hanceville Elementary School gathered Tuesday afternoon to celebrate their efforts to help Hanceville High School’s Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA) collect plastic lids for a recycling project. The plastic lids will be recycled and exchanged for three benches (also made from recycled plastic) that will be brought back from Evansville, Indiana and placed at the schools.
FCCLA Sponsor Amy Chambers said she plans to place one of the benches in her classroom, one in the elementary school and one in the high school. The kids began collecting the lids for the benches in January. They gathered lids from bottles, food containers and other products.
“They gave us a list of things to look for and we had to check everything and make sure it was clean and make sure there was no metal,” she said. “If there was paper in the lids, we had to dig that out. It was a process.”
Each bench required 100 pounds of plastic lids to produce. Chambers said she wasn’t sure how many lids would be needed to add up to 100 pounds.
“I didn’t know if it would take us a year or how long,” she said. “After a couple of months, we weighed them, and we had 120 pounds.”
Chambers set a deadline for the students to turn in the lids and just last week, the kids turned in another 100 pounds.
As an incentive for the kids to pitch in, the FCCLA offered shirts that Chambers made in her classroom to each student who brought in a gallon Ziplock bag of plastic lids.
“The elementary kids really took that and stepped up. It was crazy for a couple of weeks,” smiled Chambers.
Chambers will travel to Evansville during spring break to deliver the plastic lids.
She explained, “They are going to have the benches ready. We are basically replacing the plastic that they made our benches out of, so we don’t have to make two trips.”
The benches will be rainbow–colored.
“I wanted to do all the colors because that is what all the kids will remember, all the colored lids,” Chambers said.
The FCCLA collected a total of 303 pounds of plastic lids for this community service project.
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