Hi All,

Writing in for the first time from Australia. I'm education support (design classroom pracs and run them for teachers), I run a community science lab, and also help run a charity that donates science equipment to teachers and schools that we salvage from Universities (www.phoenixschoolprogram.com). I wanted to write in regarding the later initiative. Essentially we pick up lots of of stuff for the charity and donate them but we often get left with stuff that is "incomplete".

Glassware like bottles often have caps that degrade over time and they get tossed. We then get the bottles donated en masse to our charity. We can't really gift them as is because a bottle without a cap is more like a vase. So we've been trying to find ways of "upcycling" the items, i guess a vase is kind of "upcycling". The picture below is an example of what we were able to do with 3d printing. We designed a cap to fit the bottle (O-ring inside makes it waterproof) and at least we have a bottle now. I made some adjustments and we now have the beginnings of a mini bio-reactor. These could be used to grow algae, make a mini aquaponics system and more. We could even turn the bottles into terrariums as part of an ecology/food web experiment.

I just wanted to see if anyone else might have some ideas on how to upcycle this bottle into something that could be used in the classroom and how it can be used. Our goal would then be to create some study guides on how to use the item in a way that aligns to the curriculum here as i think packaging up "the thing" with resources on how it can plug into a classroom's activities would be really helpful. but that is an assumption on my part. Thoughts? Would love to leverage the collective minds of educators on how we can upcycle this stuff and make it useful once again rather than seeing it go to landfill.

SP

3d printing can expand the use case of a given item, made using tinkercad