A handful of medication vial plastic flip caps. Photo: Ros Morgan
During the Branch’s recent Health and Environmental Sustainability Conference (HESC), attendees heard about a Western Health project to salvage and re-use the flip caps from medication bottles. These plastic caps are not recyclable and take can hundreds of years to break down in landfill.
Clinical nurse educator Mary Anne Magnaye and registered nurse Thao Ly shared that, as part of a larger recycling project, they have collaborated with a local high school to donate their flip caps, which the students are using to create an art piece. When complete, this piece will be displayed at Mary Anne and Thao’s workplace to showcase the hospital’s culture of sustainability.
Members interested in similarly salvaging medication-vial plastic flip caps can now do so via the ANMF (Vic Branch). We have arranged to be a collection point for a selection of artists and organisations – including Reverse Art Truck and Recycled Pen Art – who are keen to re-use these components.
Pens made from recycled medication-vial plastic flip caps. Photo: Recycled Pen Art
Reverse Art Truck is a Melbourne-based not-for-profit organisation that collects rejects, seconds, factory offcuts and now flip caps for distribution to schools, early learning centres and the community. A grass roots organisation, its mission is to pursue and promote creative re-use and repurposing of materials that would otherwise go to landfill.
Recycled Pen Art, run by a Branch member, creates beautiful pens from intravenous medication plastic caps or other recycled materials. Recycled Pen Art donates $1 from each pen sold to the Sea Turtle Foundation, a not-for-profit non-government organisation that works to protect these endangered creatures whose lives and habitats are threatened by plastic that ends up in the oceans.
If you would like to donate your caps for re-use, you can drop them off at the Branch, 535 Elizabeth Street Melbourne, Level 8, attention ANMF Environmental Health Officer Ros Morgan.
