Piles of old Vancouver Aquarium fleece jackets and vests, 20,000 metres of thread and sewing students from Eric Hamber secondarythats all it took to transform discarded uniforms into blankets and hats, which the higher schoolers donated to the Salvation Armys Harbour Light centre on East Cordova Wednesday.
Scott Finestone, Vancouver Aquariums outreach coordinator, said the aquarium was looking at reducing waste when its sustainability coordinator suggested turning the old staff uniforms into blankets instead of throwing them away. The aquarium considered using volunteers at its Stanley Park location but realized it was too big a job.
We thought what a great project it would be to get high school students involved from a home economics class, he said, adding that about 150 jackets and vests were turned into dozens of blankets and toques.
[Uniforms] wear outthe zipper busts or the elastic around the wrists busts. Something goes wrong. They just have a big tear in them so we cant continue to use them or staff moves on and we take the uniforms back. If theyre not in good condition, we hold on to themuntil we finally discovered this good use for them.
Finestone hopes to continue the tradition of recycling uniforms when possible. We are going to attempt to do this every year, but it depends. The amount of uniforms we brought to the school were things that had piled up over a couple of years, so we might not have enough to do this every year, but certainly this is an initiative we want to do again in the future.
Eric Hamber sewing teacher Nina Ho said students spent roughly 250 volunteer hours on the project, which produced 24 large blankets, 28 smaller ones and 45 hats.
The school created a sewing club several years ago. A student came up with its name last yearSeams of Love.
[The schools] always been doing various things for charities[The sewing work] was done all piecemeal depending on who had time. First we cut everything up, and then we started serging everything. In terms of thread, I think we used at least 20,000 metres, Ho said. The blankets will keep somebody warm and we havent wasted very much material. Considering everything, theres very little wastage from the jackets.
Nicole Wong, 17, put in 12 hours of sewing.
We all did it in our free time. Theres one girl whop spent over 30 hours doing it, explained the Grade 12 student.
As textile students were here a lot after school anyway working on projects. It was just a really fun thing that we could all get together and do. It was a good challenge. There was a lot of fleece and there were a lot of us working. It was a lot of work with the ripping and tearing and the cutting, but it was enjoyable. In the end its a really good feelingthe sense of accomplishment that we turned all these piles of jackets that would have gone to waste. Now its in all these piles of blankets and hats.
Twitter: @Naoibh
