High School Students are using old plastic bags to make sleeping mats for the homeless….and its happening across the country.
According to the Earth Policy Institute, 100 billion plastic bags pass through the hands of consumers each year.
That’s almost one bag per person each day. And so many of these bags wind up littering the streets and threatening our oceans and wildlife, not to mention landfills where they basically never decompose. Never is a bit of an embellishment, it takes about 500 years for one of these plastic bags to actually break down in a landfill.
But all across the country, in states like Michigan, North Carolina, and Indiana, kindhearted high school students have found a brilliant way to reuse and transform plastic bags.
Some of these students attend Hatboro-Horsham High School in Pennsylvania. Nancy Gablein, a senior, organizes the school’s Interact Club. Several times a week, club members spend their free class periods making “plarn,” or plastic yarn.
They twist and tie their way through thousands of donated plastic bags by cutting them into strips, rolling them up and around wooden pegs, and putting their crochet skills to use.
The end result is a 6-foot-long sleeping mat that can provide comfort and warmth to homeless people sleeping on the streets. These mats are also water-resistant, and they help keep bugs away.
One single mat requires from 500 to 700 bags, but to these amazing students, it’s all worth it in the end.