Students transform rubbish into art
The Sustainability team’s collaboration with Earth Alliance at Plymouth High School for Girls (PHSG) has culminated in a thought provoking and creative sculpture which is made from clean hospital waste.
The Earth Alliance group is a climate awareness group created by the PHSG students, for the students, with the aim of making the school and city more environmentally friendly. Alongside the various litter picks that the group attended at Derriford Hospital, the girls have been busy designing and making a sculpture of an anatomically correct heart out of clean hospital waste. Graham and the rest of the Derriford Waste Management Service kindly collected appropriate rubbish that arrived at the incinerator. The girls then used the waste to craft a heart on a 90x60cm unwanted UHP whiteboard; broken fire alarms, expired examination gloves, and bubble wrap were some of the items destined for the incinerator that were rescued and repurposed into art.
As the heart is made from rubbish, the sculpture is designed to make a visual link between waste, air pollution and cardiovascular health and hints at their scientific relationship. The Sustainability team shared articles from the BMJ, The Royal College of Physicians, The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, and the Clean Breathing Institute to help the students with their research as they built their creation.
These resources assert the fact that air pollution is the greatest environmental threat to public health. Children’s health, development and wellbeing are profoundly affected, with exposure to air pollution the second leading risk factor for death in children under 5, both globally and in the UK. ‘Air pollution’ is a mixture of pollutants including particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and ozone; in 2022, 17% of the UK sources of PM2.5 were down to industrial processes and product use, both of which are directly related to waste. The pollutants mentioned above can damage blood vessels by making them narrower and harder, affect the heart’s electrical system which controls your heartbeat, and potentially cause small changes to the structure of the heart.
Ultimately, the project alerted Earth Alliance to the dangerous health effects of air pollution and how mindfully consuming and disposing of materials can reduce the impact on our community’s health. It is always a pleasure to connect with local schools like PHSG to talk about climate change issues, especially as these young people could be making up our future NHS workforce. Here’s to a future of healthy hearts and a healthy planet!
For more information take a look at these resources:
What is air pollution by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
