PROGRESS UPDATE (July 2017)

Firstly, we would like to sincerely apologize for not uploading a progress update sooner. Many of the students involved in this projects are year 12's and we have been very busy with internal assessments and extra curricular activities. We are trying our very best for the project to keep moving forward and would like to thank you for all your support and patience.

We have an action plan in place for the building of our greenhouse. The location of our building site has changed from the unused volleyball court (front of the school) to the school garden (located back of the school), this is because the purpose of the green house is to grow plants to be used by food technology, so it seemed fitting to place it there. We have cleaned and sorted out (by size) most of the bottles during the Term 1 holidays and have a draft blue print for the green house. The walls of the house will be made from milk bottles and stilts, while the roof will be made from the other types of bottles e.g. soda bottles. Currently, we cannot progress with our plan because of health & safety regulations. The original plan was to start constructing the walls of the green house during the Term 1 holidays. We didn't manage to do this because the school required us to have a professional builder there to supervise our progress (which we obviously didn't have). We have contacted a builder and await approval so that we can kick start the construction ASAP.

We measured out a 5 metres x 2 metres square and filled it with bottles to see
how many bottles we needed for one side wall. Approx. 144 bottles

Sorting out the bottles by size and shape

On the 11th of May, the For the Future team met with an Engineer from GEA Process Engineering Ltd. He is a liquid process engineer. He discussed the properties of plastics like the different types of plastics available and it's melting points. We also talked different ways to make bricks and their molds from the equipment we have. How to connect all the properties together to make a structure, and how the size of the mold affects the structural integrity of the house. Ian also recommended that we use a heated knife to melt the plastics together. Here some of the things we went over in our meeting:

• Stamp out the excess molds from the vacuum process
• How to connect all the properties together to make the house/ melting/snapping them together which could be hard depending on size of the molds and looking at the environment such as wind that would affect the house.
• Recommended to weld them together with a hot knife.  
• Company called apd plastics to help out with project.
• How to melt the plastic and how to clear the plastic off the mold clearly, how to heat up the mold, weld steel together then put that in an oven
• Melting point not very high - around 150 to 200 degrees. Not too high temperature
• Buy some conventional oven then donate them to the workshops in school  
• Might be able to talk to a guy he knows to help out with the brick molds.

If you are still following our journey of improving the environment, we would like to apologise for not updating the blog sooner enough and thank you for your support. We hope more people will spread the word about our project and the aim of it.

Yours sincerely,

For the Future.