Mini-pat: reduce, re-use and recycle – working with plastics

In this Mini-PAT you will design and make a useful new product from old plastic bottles. But first you will look at how plastic is used in everyday life.

You will only do individual work in this Mini-PAT.

Reduce, re-use, recycle

In Grade 8 Term 4, you learnt that the environment is damaged when more and more things are made and thrown away. You learnt that waste is formed in order to make new products, and that the products themselves become waste when they are thrown away. You can reduce the negative impact of this practice on the environment in different ways.

Firstly, you can buy fewer things, which is called reducing your consumption.

Secondly, you can use some things over and over, so that you don’t have to buy new things. This is called re-using things. You can also re-use something for a different purpose than it was originally made for. For example, many people use old hot-water tanks (geysers) to make “braai-skottels” in which they can make fire and barbeque food outside.

But what if something you own gets broken or you don’t have any use for it anymore? Then you have to throw it away. Fortunately, there is a clever way of throwing things away, by separating the different types of waste.

For example, if you and your family collect all your plastic waste separately, then someone can take that plastic to a recycling factory where new plastic is made from the old plastic. At a recycling factory, the old plastic is washed and shredded into very small pieces.

It is then melted and “moulded” in the shape of “pellets”. The pellets can then be used as the raw material to make new plastic products.