Turning Trash into Treasure: My Journey with Recycled Beads

Hey ladies, how is your weekends all going and I'm sure it's going fine.

Lately i have been more concerned about the beach and since i moved here, I'm no longer concerned about swimming alone because i can't enjoy swimming if i discover where I swim is not hygienic and when itt comes to hygiene, I really care about taking care of the environment environment i find myself and now in the Caribbean.

I have lived on this beautiful island for over 2 months now and that's long enough for me to start noticing how much plastic waste we have around us and i thought people would care about it because they all visit the beach but sadly, people don't care and they would have cared if they had been enlightened about the danger that comes with waste on the beach and when i decided to take matters into my hands, i discovered that there was not enough places or systems to recycle all these plastics, so most of it ends up in landfills or in the ocean and that's really sad for a country doing well economically but that’s not okay for me.

Luckily for me after trying to reach out to several organizations and finally I was so happy when I found out about Perpetual Plastics SXM, a non-profit organization in St. Maarten that’s doing something amazing with plastic waste. They collect donated plastic and they are mostly type #2 and #5 and they gradually turned it into useful and beautiful things like beads, learning tools, garden tools, and craft supplies. And the best part? Everything is made from 100% recycled plastic and i was really into it.

I was so happy to know what plastic waste could do and since i was into jewelry already and i make beads from shells, i already knew what was next for me and it was like everything was planned for me.

I recently got the chance to visit their space and see how the whole process works from beginning to end and it was so exciting and I learnt every process and it involves people bring in their clean plastic and they get paid which is an awesome way of giving people jobs, after which they've collected those plastics, they get sorted into the right types and after that, it’s cut up and ground down into small plastic chips. These chips are sorted by color, then melted and poured into different molds to create new items.