Make a plastic bottle lid mosaic

Before you begin

• Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.
• Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely.
• Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help. 

Planning and setting up this activity

• This activity involves using plastic bottle tops, which you could ask people to bring in from home. There may be for lots of reasons, such as living situations or costs. You may need to collect them over several weeks.
• The mosaics can be made in groups of any size. People could make their own individual one, make a mosaic in pairs or small groups, or you could make a big mosaic as a whole group.
• Books you could read to explore plastic pollution include ‘The Odd Fish’ by Naomi Jones and ‘Somebody Swallowed’ by Sarah Roberts

Running this activity

1. Gather everyone together and ask everyone to look at the bottle lids.
2. Ask if anyone can tell or knows where any of the bottle lids came from, such as a milk bottle or a drink bottle, and if anyone knows what we should do with them once we’ve finished with them. We should recycle them.
3.  Explain that plastic bottle lids can be recycled and turned into new items, such as plant pots. It’s estimated that an average of 35.8 million plastic bottles are used every day in the UK, but only 19.8 million are recycled each day. This means there are on average 16 million plastic bottles a day not making their way into the recycling bin.
4.  Ask why plastic bottle lids that aren't recycled might harm our environment. Plastic bottles that aren’t recycled often end up in landfill, or even worse, in our oceans and on our beaches, where they can harm wildlife and our environment. Plastic bottle lids are one of the most common items of litter found on beaches and can become choking hazards for wildlife, especially fish and birds.
5. See if people can think of any ways that we could replace the plastic lids with something else or encourage people to recycle. For example, milk bottles can be glass with a foil lid, some lids are now attached the bottles and some bottles have recycling information printed on them.
6. Tell everyone that they’re going to use the bottles to make a mosaic. A mosaic is a picture or pattern made by putting together lots of small pieces.
7. Ask everyone to get into pairs or small groups.
8. Give each group a some cardboard, card or something to stick their mosaic onto. One side of a cereal box may work well.
9. Each group should decide what they want to make a mosaic of. They could choose something related to Earth Tribe, such as flowers. They could also make art with a message about why we need to recycle, such as making a beach animal who might swallow plastic accidentally. It could also be something else the group likes.
10. Once they’ve decided, they can draw it onto the cardboard. When the groups have drawn out their design, they can collect any bottle lids they need and start sticking them onto their design with the tape or glue dots. It’s best to use something that can be removed, so the bottle lids can be recycled. If any need cutting up to make different shapes, make sure this is done carefully and with adult support.
11. People may want to use other materials, such as felt tip pens or googly eyes, to add some details to their mosaic.
12. When everyone’s finished, if anyone wants to and is happy to, they could show their group’s mosaics to everyone and talk about what they’ve made. You could also put all the designs in the middle of the space for people to look at and talk about what they like if they want to.
13. At the end, you can either keep the plastic bottle lid artwork to display or take it apart and recycle the bottle lids. If anyone’s taking the work home, remind them to recycle the bottle lids if they ever wanted to get rid of it.