A few weeks back, I was perusing the feed on my Zuckerberg-book account, catching up with the happenings in the lives of the folk that I haven't been able to recruit to the blockchain yet, when something that an old schoolmate of mine shared caught my eye.
It was an article about a guy who was collecting recyclable bottles and cans to raise funds for the local library, but was wondering what to do with the non-recyclable lids rather than have them dumped into landfill.
The article goes on to introduce a charity called Envision, who are using 3D Printing technology to take these unusable plastic lids, and use them to produce brightly coloured mobility aids and prosthetics for children.
Image taken directly from Envision website - link below
You can read the article here if you want to. I duly on-shared the article, as I felt it was a worthwhile read.
A couple of hours later, I got an email at work from my wife telling me that someone had set up a collection point for the lids at her office - she hadn't even got around to reading the article I'd shared, but recalled seeing it.
The organisation collecting on behalf of Envision in Australia are called Lids4Kids and have reprsentatives all over Australia. These guys gather up the lids from the collection points, make sure they are of the right type, are clean and then sort by colour before shipping them off to Envision.
So not only, are these things not destroying our environment by being dumped into landfill (or worse, littering), they are being used to truly make life easier for children.
A bag of lids we have collected, with some help from other family members outside our household, to be sent off to Envision via Lids4Kids
If you want to know more about Envision, check out their website here.