Eight million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, but Dr. T.H. Culhane’s graduate students at the University of South Florida are finding new ways to recycle single-use plastics.
“I saw, in the middle of the ocean when I was about 20 feet underwater, there was a stream of plastics just floating amongst beautiful marine creatures,” said Melody Yin, a climate change mitigation student.
By turning bottle caps into signs, Dr. Culhane’s students are keeping them from landfills, incinerators and possibly the ocean.
“It is all about lengthening the lifecycle of that single item,” said Yin.
Plastic bottle caps aren’t accepted by all recycling facilities because they’re made of a different material than the bottle itself. Instead they have to be thrown away, where their small size makes them a pollution risk.
“It polluted our oceans, our lands,” said Lidiah Iwo, a sustainable tourism student. “That’s the number one problem that I can say.”
While recycling these bottle caps prevents them from being buried or burned, not using them in the first place is the best way to prevent plastic pollution.
“This issue, if we don’t refrain earlier, it will be very dangerous for us,” said Iwo.
