Saving bottle Caps for collage and bag handles for mobiles, Saving the planet, Singapore Style

Angela Lansbury's bottle cap collage of red flowers. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.


Singapore flag

Inexpensive Colourful Souvenirs

What can you collect for free on your travels? How can you avoid discarding constantly? Years ago you could collect shells and pretty pebbles from holidays on the beach. I did this as a child. Now many countries ban collecting shells, pebbles and sand. So how come you can buy so many shells from shops and shell covered items on the internet and shell jewellery? You can still collect empty shells in parts of Florida, so long as they have nothing living inside. (Later you can check the article listed below.)

Collecting Litter To Save The Earth

Now collecting has taken a different turn. What can you use to create art, and save plastic polluting the planet, and waste costing money in disposal? As you travel around you see huge numbers of things which could be recycled.


UK flag

Plastic Bags
Plastic bags. Supermarkets have boxes for mixed or specific items. Morrisons supermarket in London collects and reuses their own bags and boxes.

Lovely card bags from dress shops have cooured, even gold, rope effect handles.
What can you do with the rope effect handles? Sew a pair of tope handles onto the front flaps of buttonless jackets to stop the jacket falling off your shoulders. Make a mobile.

Public outdoor mobile. Designs include bullseye effect, Singapore flag. Photo taken at One North, in Singapore, by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Cute design showing two cats in contrasting grey and black on white. You could also show black and white cats on a coloured background. Photo taken at One North in Singapore by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Designs featuring animals, birds and fish.

You can use the design from fabric mobiles to inspire your bottle cap images.


Angela Lansbury's flower, grass, sun and sky design, bottle caps collage. Work in progress. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Everywhere you see cans and bottles with brightly coloured tops. At first we thought it was better to leave caps on bottles. The bottles stay crushed if the cap is on. Would a bottle without a cap be a trap for fish in the sea? I asked locally in Singapore and was assured that bottles are sent for recycling.

School Craft Collections

If I had seen a collection box I could have put my cans and caps and other items there. Some schools have boxes to collect paper and plastic and even broken crayons and unwanted pens and pencils and brushes which can be used in art and craft classes.

I had already heard of the idea of reusing discarded everyday items to make a collage. I admired a huge mural in a school which I visited in Singapore. Many children and parents and teachers must have contributed.

But when I saw the smaller one in the CC, I was prompted to action. I could save or collect enough items.

My bottle cap picture was inspired by the one in the entrance hall of Toa Payoh South Community Centre in Singapore.

Image

What do you see in the picture? I am planning a yellow sun, top right, green grass below, blue sky above, red petal flowers with contrasting white or yellow contrasting colour centres depending on the colour availability. As you stand further away, the picture is clearer.

Background Colour Caps

I originally tried to put the blue caps as the background evoking sky. But if you don't have enough of one colour, the image gets confusing. Simpler is better. 

Background Colour Card

For the background support I started with one piece of green A4 card from the cover of a folder whose contents were out of date and thrown away.

The spiral binding left attached makes the picture look a bit like a flag. I could use red and white to create a simple flag, such as the Singapore flag.

Background Colour Paper

When I had more bottle caps I added a piece of white A4 paper. The flimsy paper was inteded to be temporary. However, the white background works better, enhances the colours. So I might add thicker paper behind. Should I keep the dull green. I prefer white. However, having two pieces of contrasting background creates a yin-yan day-night effect. Comments and suggestions welcome.

This is my first bottle cap collage. Wiki does not have any images. However, you will find many inspirational pictures on Pinterest.

Small Projects
On Pinterest you can see bottle caps turned into small items and large ones. Amongst the small are noughts and crosses, clock faces with the caps inside or around the edge.

Middle Size Projects
You can creat a picture inside the metal lid of a biscuit tin. Middle size item ideas include the six-point Star of David. A doormat. Cover the top of a half size fridge.

Giant Projects
Giant mosaics cover an entire wall. A delight for the eye. You can also cover table tops, entire tables including the legs, and wooden or plastic armchairs. The plastic makes a weatherprrof decoration for chairs on a balcony, patio, yard, garden or poolside.

Useful Websites
https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/oceanography/where-have-all-seashells-gone.htm
https://www.pinterest.co.uk/tbirdeast/bottle-cap-collage-ideas/

About the Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Please share links to your favourite posts.

Go Recycling - Cleaning Up a beach in Hawaii - could you clean up your beach or city?

Trash Or Stash?
Trash is a worldwide problem. It isn't just ugly. First it is harming wildlife. Photos on the internet show abandoned fishing nets strangling turtles and tangled around the fins of fish. A turtle has a straw stuck up its nose. Birds and fish have pieces of plastic and plastic bags in their stomachs. The plastic is not excreted but forming a giant blockage or ball, uncomfortable, and killing them. 

How can we stop this happening? Prevention or cure? Cure is good. But prevention is better. Cure is good, necessary, but we must think longterm, because with the human population expanding, wildlife is diminishing. The Chinese curbed the birthrate of citizens in Shanghai to one child per family, although the government has now changed that policy.

We can prevent plastic being made. Recycle existing plastic. It is no use doing one without the other. But no use avoiding doing one because you or your orgnaization cannot do all three. You do what you can do. Others do what they can do. Together we can make a difference.

How do you change habits? Analyse your own family's behaviour and try to co-ordinate. You see what a baby does. it picks up things to look at them. Bored, it throws them away.

How can we utilitse the children's urge to throw? Stones in a pond? Making ripples.  What about plastic? Instead of throwing plastic where it should not go, throw it where it should go.

I have videos on the internet of litter bins which are shaped like creatures with a mouth which opens to receive litter like big versions of pedal bins in your home or nearby supermarket. The bin then says thank you or well done or somethign amusing in a voice matching the bin design, quakcing duck, or whatever. 

Next, I immediately envisage bottle caps being used to be thrown at targets in a game. Children will gather items to collect to throw into bins, or to make into a game.

Some people, adults, like to collect. Encourage them to collect litter.

Some people like to throw away. Encourage them to throw things in the right bin.

Some people like to create. Encourage them to create objects from abandoned plastic.

Songs
Songwriters can write a recycling song for their favourite project or city or the world. Here's my immediate effort.

Song:
What are you doing today
by Angela Lansbury
What are you doing today? Are you throwing your life away?
Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Will you litter and dirty?  Or clean up our earth! 

 Look - Litter's heartbreaking. Help! You could be making
Our precious earth, more dirty or clean than it was at your birth.
Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Will you litter and dirty?  Or clean up our earth! 

You could be prospecting. You could be collecting.
 Instead of thwarting, you could be sorting.

Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Don't you litter and dirty?  Help clean up our earth! 

We're circled by plastic. But life is elastic.
Let's pick up the litter. Let's make our life better.
While you are here, collect, recycle, make a great souvenir.
Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Will you litter and dirty?  Or clean up our earth! 

How was the wonderful world at your birth?
The plants and tall trees which grew from moist earth
Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Will you litter and dirty?  Or clean up our earth! 

When each grain of sand could smoothe your small your hand
When you could spend hours just sniffing the flowers
Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Will you litter and dirty?  Or clean up our earth! 

School kids walked and looked, toddlers turned picture books
Magnificent mountains, soft, pure clean water, magic dancing fountains
Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Will you litter and dirty?  Or clean up our earth! 

Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Will you drop litter?  Or will you tidy and clean up our earth! 
Remember the wonderful world at your birth, 
Don't you litter and dirty?  Help clean up our earth! 

Angela Lansbury. Copyright 2019.
Please pass on with the author's tagline. Sing to your favourite traditional out of copyright tune.

Reward. Advertise rewards.

Punish. Advertise fines.

Here's one way to do it. Like the Canadian company in Hawaii did it. Not hurting or harming. helping.

Don't hurt. Don't harm. Help.

CLEARING BEACHES BIG TIME - BIG PROJECTS
Clenaing. Inventing. A team in Canada set about a project on cleaning plastic from a beach and picked a nototrious beach. Hawaii.

The solution was simple. Vacuum the beach with a tube from a large vacuum cleaner.

However, how do you separate the sand from the plastic? Put what you collected in water. The sand sinks. The plastic floats.

Great. That will help beaches on an industrial scale where there is a huge problem.

LOVELY LITTER
But there's litter everywhere. On beaches and promenades by the beaches. We eat and drink all day. We throw away everything we use.

Look around the nearest room, building, garden, street. What do you see?

Wrapping for food. Drinks bottles. cereal packets. paper bags. Plastic bags. Bottle tops.

HOLIDAY CLEAR UP
On a small scale you could do this with a bucket of water.

If every family visiting the beach, instead of collecting shells, collected plastic, we could all make a difference.

REWARDS
Every visit and local who clears up can be rewarded with a badge or piece of jewellery made from part of a plastic bottle.

Cut the bottom off a see-through plastic bottle and you have a circular see-through badge or brooch and cut out a circle from a piece of abandoned paper and you have a name tag, buseiness card or advertisement.

Ships
Every ship should pay a plastic tax. Or carry its own rcycling bins and recycling machines, and run recycling classes. Insted of dropping litter, ships should collect it.

No need to worry about dirt on things you pick up making you or the family dirty. Plastic in the sea has already been washed. Plastic on the beach can be washed in the sea or the shower.

I used to collect shells as a child. It was years before I discvoered that shells were the abandoned homes of dead sea creatures.

CHILDREN CAN COLLECT
Today's children have another opportunity. They can collect coloured bottle tops and put them in a recycling bin.

Plastic should be collected and remoulded into litter bins.

RECYCLING PLASTIC INTO JEWELLERY
But where does that litter go? Not back into the bins then out to sea. Instead it can be made into bracelets and necklaces.

Classes for tourists. Free classes - if you collect a big bag of littler. Otherwise low cost lessons, or even, free but donations welcome. Make souvenirs of your holiday. Donate for the class. Donate for the jewellery you make. Take it home.

Or donate it to be sold or given away. People can buy it. Or take it home as souvenir for your holiday and  donate money.

You are often asked, 'What did you do on holiday?' You have an answer.

You did not leave litter behind. You helped clear it up.

Useful Websites
Problem
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/waves-garbage-are-washing-beach-dominican-republic-180969747/
Solution
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-48551041/how-do-you-vacuum-plastic-from-a-beach

Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and phtographer, author and speaker. If you need a speaker on the environment, I have won two levels of contests on speeches on the environment. I can speak on radio or TV or give an amusing keynote speech.