About

In 2019, already aware of the problems caused by plastic waste, students and their teachers at two middle schools in Stamford, Connecticut (United States) had been challenged by SoundWaters to turn their education into action. Over the course of a single school year, the students collected more than one million plastic bottle caps to prevent them reaching the Long Island Sound. But what do you do with more than one million plastic bottle caps?

Held over a period of 8 weeks from March – April 2021, the Million Bottle Caps Design Challenge was hosted in partnership with SoundWaters and the SPE Foundation to address the issue of plastic waste through design and education. With the support of WDO’s Young Designers Circle and engineers from SPE Foundation, the initiative enabled 135 K-12 students from Stamford to gain critical design skills and transform their plastic caps into meaningful, usable products.

Objectives

A straightforward statement was selected to help guide the students throughout the challenge: let’s design a product that could be useful in the kitchen. 

This simple approach not only allowed the students to address a complex issue, like plastic pollution, in a practical manner, but also gave them the opportunity to experiment with new design frameworks and make fundamental connections with the UN SDGs.

Outcomes

In alignment with the provided statement, students were encouraged to use their imagination and creativity when developing their design. The winning concept – a dish rack – was subsequently produced by Braskem, SPE’s partner in plastics education, who processed the bottle caps into plastic pellets to manufacture the design. On a more global scale, the initiative also demonstrated how design thinking can help inspire the next generation to take action and tackle key challenges affecting our world today.

To learn more about the Million Bottle Caps Design Challenge, download our Report.