Shropshire schools urged to get involved in art competition to highlight plastic waste

Business Composite Prime Decking is running the ‘Message in a Bottle Top’ competition which it says highlights the impact plastic waste has on the environment.

The schools involved are collecting and turn plastic bottle tops into life-sized art murals and sculptures.

Charles Taylor, director at Composite Prime, said: “With everything from giant jellyfish to a great white shark, the sculptures created by schools up and down the country were incredibly creative and showcased a huge amount of plastic waste. The response to the 2021 campaign was incredible, it saw 785 schools, 845 teachers, 110,432 children and 194,360 parents collect over 90,000 bottle tops.”

The initiative provides teachers and support staff with associated learning resources including lesson plans, presentations, artist top tips and activity worksheets to complete in class and at home.

“Our Message in a Bottle Top campaign has been created specifically to target younger generations and Composite Prime is extremely proud to play a small part in educating the next generation about sustainability,” Mr Taylor said.

"We can’t wait to see the engagement with the campaign this year, and the incredible entries we’re hoping to receive," he added.

All competition entries submitted by schools, ahead of the deadline on May 20 will be independently judged by Composite Prime and the winning school will receive a playground makeover worth £5,000.

The top 10 schools will have the opportunity to showcase their artwork in an online exhibition and two runners up will receive tablets worth more than £100.

Each square metre of composite decking contains the equivalent of more than 3,000 plastic bottle caps or 280 plastic bottles. In its seven years of operation, Composite Prime says it has saved the equivalent of 176 million plastic milk bottles from landfill and more than 1.8 billion bottle top caps.