Ocean 2012

The Youth Top Gardeners is a club of teenages aged 15-17 who are passionate about the environment and upcycling. To show their love of upcycling they built a garden completely out of recycled materials.

One of the items they built, and one that was shown great interest at the official launch of the garden, was the door.

The door was found by one of the YTG members in the garden before it was built and it was decided that they would use this door in the garden as it seemed like a waste to throw it out.

Everyone agreed that the garden needed more than plants to decorate it so, we decided that the garden needed an art piece and that it shoulf involve everone.

Our idea was to create a decorative item that was environmentally friendly and promoted upcycling.

The end result was our bottle pots. The bottle pots are made using plastic bottles and wire. They are very simple to make:

1. You just cut out a square of the plastic on one side, fill the pots with soil and wrap the wire around so you can join a few of the bottles together. The bottles take up less space than regular plant pots and can be hung on walls.
2. We asked some people to bring in bottles from home, that were clean and had lids, so we could make our bottle pots.
3. We asked the others to bring in soil so we could fill the bottles.

The bottles were fun and easy to make!!

Kathryn Tolster

We constructed a mural this year as part of a larger environmental project, in which we put together a vegetable and herb garden in our local area.

The message we wanted to send using this mural was that if young people working with a very low budget and mostly waste from home can make a difference in their local community and reduce waste then employees and employers in larger organisations could certainly do the same.

One of our goals was to encourage waste management and reduction, so we made our mural by upcycling materials such as magazine scraps, old packaging, etc and sticking them onto a large unused board we found lying around our building, thus giving them the new purpose of being our main campaign poster.

Lola Hourihane

If you have a pair of old jeans and you don't need them, you can reuse them! Here's one way:

1. Use the scissors to cut the bottom part of one foot, cut it as in the size that we want to made the bag.
2. The other foot of the jeans you can make the belt four your bag.
3. We sew the beld with the other part of the bag than we start the decoration of the bag, with buttons or with leftover pieces of jeans

Rinalda Proko