By Jed Lanyon
Woori Yallock Primary School student Olivia Hyndman has inspired her classmates and teachers to collect their used bottle tops and lids for a special project to help children with disabilities.
Envision Hands is a not-for-profit community initiative that uses 3D printing to turn plastic waste, bound for landfill, into mechanical prosthetic hands for children in need around the world.
The bottle caps are shredded and made into a filament and then fed into a 3D printer to create a colourful superhero inspired prosthetic hand.
In just over two months, Olivia has spurred Woori Yallock Primary School and the wider community to collect over 16,000 bottle caps to put towards the Envision Hands project.
Olivia said she found out about Envision Hands through her grandparents and that she’s excited to be involved in such a helpful project.
“We do class competitions to see how many each class can get. We weigh them all and it gets very competitive,” she said.
The grade five student then speaks at assembly at the end of the week to share which class collected the most, earning them an all-important extra five minutes of lunchtime.
“There was a class that got over a thousand bottle tops… They got 4.2 kilos in two weeks.”
Olivia said she was so happy to see her classmates take the initiative to reach out to local businesses to collect their plastic bottle tops.
“By donating these bottle tops, all of us are recycling and helping the environment.”
“We send them to Envision Hands… And there are symbols on the bottle tops that you know which ones they can and can’t melt down.
The bottle tops must be small plastic lids and have the number 2 or 4 printed on them inside the recycled triangle logo.
But those bottle caps which do not feature a number can still be used for other projects by Envision.
Olivia’s mother Rebecca Hyndman said she was proud to see her daughter take the idea to the junior school council and then the assistant principal to help get Woori Yallock Primary School involved.
“It’s pretty cool, she’s been really motivated to do it herself and she’s done really well with it,” Ms Hyndman said.
Olivia invites locals to take part in the project and said, “Bring your bottle tops here, you can drop them off at the office.”
