IMU Sustainability Student Club (IMUSUS) initiated a social responsibility project called ‘Upcycling Art’ to draw attention to the recycling and upcycling of plastic, paper and metal as a material in 2024. As part of this project, the community started to make paintings with the upcycling of plastic lids and started to collect plastic lids in the campus areas.
IMU Sustainability Student Club (IMUSUS) and the Sustainability Office are jointly carrying out a plastic upcycling project to reduce the amount of plastic waste generated in campus areas. The project team worked in the North Campus dining halls on November 27, 2024 to both announce the project to the campus community and to collect plastic waste on site. The team members collected the plastic lids of the drinks served in the day’s lunch menu to use in their project. During the event, a total of 850 grams of plastic lids were collected in both the staff dining hall and the student dining hall. The collected lids will be upcycled by IMUSUS to design a painting. In the event, students in the dining hall were also informed about plastic recycling and the recycling projects carried out at our university were introduced. Team members pointed out that plastic waste production, which was 156 million tonnes in 2000, more than doubled to 353 million tonnes by 2019 and only 9% of this waste is recycled. For this reason, they stated that consumer behavior changes should be targeted to remove single-use plastics from daily life as a priority, and for plastics that cannot be avoided in this process; recycling and upcycling processes should be given importance.
In the workshops previously organised by the IMU Sustainability Student Club and the Sustainability Office, two paintings were made by upcycling the plastic lids collected by the club members. A total of 1,115 plastic lids, equivalent to 1.5kg of plastic lids, were used in the works of ‘Cookie Monster’ and ‘Kermit’ characters. It is aimed to exhibit these works in the exhibition to be prepared by IMUSUS to draw attention to the environmental pollution caused by plastic wastes and the environmental footprint caused by the use of plastic by individuals.
You can follow the future workshops of the ‘Upcycling Art’ project on the Instagram account of the IMU Sustainability Student Club and the IMU Sustainability Office and participate in the workshops.
